Explanation

Mm. I guess I should have mentioned this before, but the "The Cat" is a revamped short story that I wrote at the end of my freshman year of high school. 
We were given the short story assignment and I wrote it then read  it before my class. It was extremely gratifying. Everyone loved it. 
I never got my story back. I went to my teacher and she told me that she wasn't through grading them. I went back on the last day of school and couldn't find her. The next year, I went to my sophomore English teacher and asked if it was in my file and she ranted about being an overwhelmed new teacher and that I'd just have to come back to her later.
My somewhat-paranoid mother says that someone stole my story and kept it for him or herself. I'm not sure it was that good, but I'll never know, because I never read it again.
People, this was in the age of handwriting and typewriters. I'm not sure it was even ever on a floppy disk. 
For twenty years this story stayed in my mind and finally, I rewrote it. The premise is the same but I'm sure that it is significantly different than the first version. Longer, for one.
I wrote it with my oldest son in mind. I thought that it might have been the story that I would have liked to have read when I was his age, coming up on ten. It is written in a sort of old-timey, affected way but that is because I imagined it this way (all those years ago) in my head. I even have a mental movie of the whole thing, a short film that I would have loved in 1986.
Not a real blog entry, just an old story and then a brief explanation for the existence thereof. 
Have an explosive Fourth of July.