For ten seconds. Then he meowed again. Repeatedly. Over and over. And over. "SHUT. THE. FUCK. UP!" I bellowed, and for fifteen seconds he did. Eventually, despite the meowing, I fell asleep. I slept fairly lightly, waking up on occasion to hear the meowing, turn over, and fall back asleep. I slept from midnight to 2:30 am. Whereupon Fancypants jumped up on the bed and meowed loudly and constantly directly in my face. He would not be cuddled. He would not be comforted. He wanted only to howl, and so he did. I threw a pillow at him, and he flounced off the bed and settled under the bed, directly under my head. Where he meowed. I managed to doze lightly for another couple of hours, waking up most times he meowed, until 4:15, when I lost my mind. "SHUT UP! SHUT UP! SHUT UP YOU FUCKING ASSHOLE!" I yelled. He did not. I took my backscratcher from the bedside table and bent down, whipping it back and forth to make him come out from under the bed. He shot out and hauled ass across the room, and I gave chase. He faked left then ran right and went back under the bed. "You son of a bitch! Get your ass out here!" I hissed, and reached under the bed to try to grab him. He ran out the opposite side of the bed, and I threw a t-shirt at him, and he ran back under the bed. "Fine, you little asshole," I growled. "That’s just FINE." I was so pissed I was shaking. "I’ll go sleep on the motherfucking couch, you little fucking…. FUCKER!" I stomped downstairs, amazed that the commotion hadn’t woken Fred, and being a nice gal I didn’t want to go wake him up. As I crossed the kitchen toward the living room, Fred sat up from where he was laying on the couch, and said "Hey Bessie, what’re you doing?" "I’M GOING TO KILL HIM!" I shrieked. "That son of a bitch has been laying under the bed MEOWING ALL FUCKING NIGHT LONG!" However, the second half of that declaration was perhaps not quite understandable, since I was busy bursting into tears. The first time in my life I’ve actually been so mad I’ve cried. Fred sat me down and put his arm around me and talked me back into a state of relative calmness, and then suggested I sleep on the couch (he hadn’t, actually, been driven to the couch by Fancypants’ infernal yowling; the bed had been so uncomfortable that he’d decided the couch would be better until he could get his newer bed set up). Then he went upstairs and put Fancypants in the bathroom. Good idea, right? Yeah, except that all the fucking cat did was turn up the volume of his meows so that they echoed through the house. There was just no shutting the little bastard up. Finally, I gave up and unpacked until about 8, when I showered and got ready to go into Huntsville for the back-to-back closings. We were supposed to close on the old house at 10:00, and the new one at 11:00. Ha.
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