They are tiny, furry, and as soon as you see them, you’ll fall in love with them. I mean, I guess… I haven’t seen them because Gary has imagined them. It was a few evenings ago he decided there were 6 under the bathroom vanity and 7 who were in holes in the bedroom walls. He was concerned about their safety and adamant that I rescue them immediately. I managed to convince him that I called our friend Rick, a cat expert, and that Rick was going to come and trap them and take them to the vet. But Rick thinks it would be a good idea to wait until they are asleep so as not to frighten them so we should just go to sleep and we will awaken to find that Rick has taken care of the cats. For a while that worked. And then it stopped working.
One of the kittens, he believes, is stuck and it is
imperative that I rescue it immediately, which is how I find myself standing on
a chair, wearing yellow rubber gloves and pretending to pull imaginary kittens
out of an imaginary hole. And, because
the hole is imaginary, I am apparently standing in the wrong spot which is
highly agitating to him. I quickly
correct course, pull the imaginary kittens to safety, put them in a box and
tell him I am taking the kittens downstairs to wait for Rick. I take a few minutes to gather myself and
head upstairs to discover that he has dismantled the tissue box and thrown the
tissues everywhere in an attempt to free the baby skunk he believed to be
trapped in the tissue box. I clean up
the tissues, “catch” the skunk, along with a butterfly and several blue jays
who are living in the curtain rods and hope that we are done for the
night. We are not.
As I settle into bed, he calls for a “very sharp knife”
which he believes he needs to free 2 chipmunks who have been sewn inside the
comforter. It made, once again, for a
very long night.
But, as hallucinations go, kittens and chipmunks aren’t so
bad. Last night, he awakened me because
he was startled by a figure, approximately 20 feet tall, it’s face concealed by
a flowing black robe. It was, he
assumed, the Grim Reaper, except that it wasn’t carrying a scythe. He
asked the creature what it wanted and it lowered its hood to reveal that it had
Gary’s face. I sat with him a while and
tried (quite unsuccessfully) to distract him until the creature disappeared
into a mist. Shortly thereafter,
however, Gary had a panicked feeling that the creature was actually there for
me and he told me to go to my bedroom and lock the door. I did go to the bedroom and sat in the
darkness until the creature reappeared and Gary tried bargaining with it. He was, he said, not ready to die. He has so much more he wants to do but if it
has to take someone, he implored it to take him and leave me in peace.
I don’t know what to think anymore except that this all stinks. More than a skunk in a tissue box.
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