Beat me with a fish

Last night at about 4:00, I got up and went to the bathroom. When I came back to bed, Bob wasn't there--he had gotten up, too. I got back into bed, he came back a few minutes later. Dinah was crouching down at the end of the bed on my side, but Pyewacket wasn't around. I guess she heard us moving around, though, from wherever she was, because she walked into the bedroom and Dinah started growling.

I reached down and touched Dinah, and said, "What's wrong? It's just Pyewacket!" but she kept growling low in her throat, and started that weird keening noise that is always the prelude to a fight.

Meanwhile, Pyewacket's just standing there looking at her, like "WTF is your problem?"

Dinah jumped down off the bed, growling and hissing, and I said, "Knock it off, Dinah!" and Bob started to go get Pyewacket so he could put her in the office or something, but before he could pick her up, she launched herself at Dinah, and before I knew what was happening, I was in the middle of a catfight.

We both started yelling, and the cats are screeching and rolling around, and Bob and I are both naked, and I do not want to get torn up, so I kind of jump out of the middle of it and into the middle of the room, and Bob picks up this gigantic fish pillow he brought me from Branson one year and starts flailing at them with it. It's the size of one of those body pillows, but in the shape and design of a trout or something.

I'm screaming at the cats, the cats are rolling around hissing and yelling, and Bob's standing there beating them with a fish.

Jeez.

He eventually got them separated enough that he could grab Pyewacket, and he took her out and shut the bedroom door. I went back to bed, and Dinah got up there by me, but she's still growling. I said, "Oh, come on, Dinah, the excitement's over, settle down," and she's looking at me, and growling, and her ears go back, and this time I'm lying in bed with no defense, i.e., I couldn't reach the fish.

I said, "Don't you lay your ears back at me," and about that time Bob came back to bed. He left Pye out, and closed the door, but of course she was immediately scratching at the bedroom door to get in, and Dinah starts growling and building up to something, and I thought, oh, for heaven's sake! Like we need this in the middle of the night.

Dinah was so upset that I really didn't want to go to sleep with her in there, so Bob went back out, stuck Pye in the office again, and I put on a robe (so that if the worst happened and she went ballistic, I could minimize the damage), picked up Dinah firmly and carried her down to the basement. I got back upstairs and reported to Bob that "the wild one is safely locked in the basement," and he asked me if she had food and water down there, and I didn't know, so I went back down and filled up the bowls.

So then we could let Pye out, and the three of us went back to bed, with Dinah in time-out in the basement. But of course, by then I couldn't get back to sleep, so after trying for a half hour or so, I got back up and came down to the computer and did some work.

The cats are usually pretty good together. They don't like each other, but they tolerate each other pretty well. Bob had said he thought he heard them tussling downstairs earlier in the night. What usually happens is that one of them is looking out the window, and there's a STRANGE CAT in THEIR YARD, and they don't like that, and they look around and take their aggression out on the CAT IN THE HOUSE who WASN'T DOING ANYTHING. And the humans whose only function is to protect and serve.

Stupid cats.

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