The Creepy Day ... and Night

Alex had just snitched the last piece of my bacon that I'd cooked for my breakfast, and was munching it while looking out at the back patio off the kitchen. I was in the front room, fiddling with my computer.

I heard Alex squawk, and she came back-pedaling into the front room, talking around the bacon in her mouth. "A BEHEADED RAT JUST FELL OUT OF THE SKY!!!"

Everybody leaped up and ran to see if she had lost her mind at last.

"Is it an omen, like the wolf pup being dropped into Claudius' lap in I, Claudius?" she asked, a grimace of horror on her face.

No, not likely, but since I've found bird feathers scattered at the exact same spot as the toes-up headless rodent, it seems likely that the little hawk I'd seen being chased by crows earlier in the day had sloppily dropped his lunch.

"Is that our rat?" I asked Bernie. ('Our rat' lives in the neighbor's roof and comes into our yard to steal bird seed and I haven't been able to kill the bastard yet.)

"That's a mouse," he said, disappointed as I was that Rat had not met his demise.

Just then, a scrub jay began to hop down from the tree, purposefully and strangely possessively.

Speculating on whether or not the jay wanted the dead mouse, or could successfully carry it away even if he did want it, we all withdrew to the house and watched from the windows. Sure enough, the jay pounced, grabbed the mouse, and flew off into the neighbor's yard with it.

"Good job on clean up, Jay."

But although a decapitated mouse falling from the sky was creepy enough on its own, that same night brought a troubling incident.

Allergies are really bad here this year, and Bernie and I take turns sleeping on the couch when our sinuses are bothering us. He was on the couch, I'd had a pretty sneezeless day, so I was back on the futon with Kermit. It was a warmish night, so the door to the outside was open.

At some point I felt Kermit roll up from his sprawl, and I turned over to see what looked like a dog sitting outside our sliding screen door. At first I thought that someone had found a black dog and shoved him in our gate, thinking it was Kermit on the loose. But then I remembered locking the gate before bedtime. I disentangled myself from the covers and got up to have a look.

Nothing was there.

I'd have thought I was dreaming, but Kermit was still staring intently at the door. And whatever it was that I saw was sitting, while Kermit was still lying down, so it wasn't a reflection from the glass part of the door.

I shut the door for the rest of the night.

The next day Bernie told me he'd heard something on the fence that woke him up, there being an open window beside the couch.

Makes me kind of nervous now to sleep with the door open.