Last night I was woken at about 3 a.m. by an uncharacteristic amount of fussing kitty noises, including some hissing and odd scratching. Got out of bed and went into the home office/spare bedroom to find a kitty face *outside* the screened window. In my half-asleep state, it looked like my Franki had somehow gotten outside (which there is no way for her to do) since bedtime and was trying to claw her way back into the house. There was a head and part of a paw in when I got there, so the hole-clawing had gotten pretty far.

So I went to the window, slid the screen up, and reached out to grab Franki and bring her in the house. Took me two tries to get my hands around her, and she was resisting coming in, which is unusual. And besides, something felt wrong. In fact, as my eyes cleared more, something began to look wrong. Specifically the eyes. Franki has amber-yellow eyes, these were amber-brown, although the rest of the face was the same. And this cat was thicker in my hands, just a little, with shorter forelegs. When I got it halfway into the house, I saw the markings on its sides - close, identical colors, but this was an agate tabby, not an agate/striped tabby. WOW! Wrong cat!

Quickly I shoved the Wrong Cat back out the window, closed the screen and the glass window for good measure. When I turned around, I saw Franki watching me from under the futon-sofa, where she had been standing off / hiding from the would-be intruder. (Willi, the larger of my two girls, was just sitting in the middle of the room the whole time. She has a great confidence in the protective power of The House, and I'm sure never believed for a moment that Intruder Kitty would make it past the insuperable Screen.)

I'm seen Intruder Kitty around the neighborhood before, and noticed how nearly identical he is to Franki. He doesn't wear a collar, and I have no idea where he lives. (I think he's a he, though I don't know why.) Now here's my dilemma: Intruder Kitty lost interest when I closed the glass window behind the screen, but I can't keep all the windows closed at night, now that the warm time of year is started. I don't want Intruder Kitty in my house, because my cats run from him outside, so I think he may not be so friendly to them as he is to me. I also can't afford to go through more window screens -- those things are $30 apiece! -- and he can clearly make his way through them with some effort. So I am fairly flummoxed. Any ideas?