Someone in my home found the devil cat we had in the basement (for scaring children to death maybe?) and left it on the kitchen floor for the better part of a week. 
Every time I walked in there I’d jump, but I was too afraid to touch it. 
It’s the size of a normal cat, probably has real cat fur and makes creepy noises and moves when you get close to it, because everybody needs something like that to remind them of the possibility of dying of fright and that you really can’t trust people who say they love you. 
Now I’m leery of normal cats to begin with because they’re evil, but this cat is a straight up devil cat. Dogs are great because they’re all like “I just want to make you happy master!” while cats are more “You are here to feed me and serve me and I will repay you by generally ignoring your existence, though I may spare you a glance now and then.”
The devil cat’s eyes tell the real story…
My youngest Neela was holding it yesterday and I yelled “Don’t look into it’s eyes!!! It’ll steal your soul!!”
She said “But dad, it looks realistic!” (This from a girl who used to open my man cave door and toss a fake but realistic spider inside to watch me jump and cry like a Jr High girl). 
I replied “It looks like somebody stuffed a real cat (who already had no soul) and put the devil in it!”
Ailish has a funny way of speaking that I love, where she uses the word for what she is feeling right in the sentence. She’d look at the devil cat and say something like “This makes me feel so… shudder”. 
I’m all for setting the cat by the curb Monday morning, but I’ve also watched enough movies to know that you can’t kill a dead devil cat by putting it in a landfill and it will likely come back and freak out your grandchildren one day. I’m a responsible member of society and assume I will love my grandchildren, so I came up with a responsible plan… 
We had a Venue small group leaders zoom call and I announced that the devil cat was the new church muffin. 
In my dad’s church my friend Mary and I were in the fireside room after church one day and discovered an old, half-eaten muffin someone had tucked in behind the display on the mantle for some reason. It may or may not have been there for a few months or even years, but the muffin never made its way to the garbage that day. 
I can’t remember who started the ball rolling, but every few months the muffin would make an appearance. My jeep, inside her guitar, hidden in my house somewhere, you just never knew when it was going to turn up. 
This went on for some years, much to our amusement and delight, until the day I handed it to her husband Ben and said “Ben, I need to win this game now. I’m not going to tell you where to put this, but it needs to be found in a place that wins the game. It needs to be a place I could never put it. I’m not going to say what I’m thinking, but we’ve been friends a long time so ____”. 
She found it in her underwear drawer. 
Game. Set. Match. 
Until one day years later when I received a FedEx package. 
One old muffin with a note: “Just when you thought it was gone?”. Our whole family burst into laughter. 
The devil cat is Venue’s new muffin. 
I told the small group leaders “One of you will find this soon. It might be in your car, it might be in your home, I expect you will pass it along? (or be removed from Venue leadership was the unspoken threat)”. 
Man, that muffin is the gift that keeps giving. 
I wish there was a way to video Chad when he opens the front door to his house later today…