You've probably told all your friends and family about this incredibly entertaining story you've been reading, prefaced with, "I'm sure it's not true, but still...."
I assure you.
It is true.
There are witnesses.
For example....
a.s. who has had many encounters over the years with him. As a young adult, she came once or twice to visit her newly married sister, but those visits dropped off quickly. Perhaps Mill assumed no one had told her that the couch belonged to him. Perhaps a muscle twitched in her cheek while she peacefully slept, inciting him to anger. Perhaps he thought we had brought him a super-size play toy. No one knows the rationale in Millhouse's mind when he chooses to leap directly into your face as you gently snore. My theory is that he enjoys the shrieking.
Then there was Amy, who worked with me in Toronto. She agreed to check in on Mill while we were on vacation. We warned her that he was ornery, but Amy's pretty relaxed. We thought she'd be OK. If worst came to worst, we told her to use pillows - he's terrified of them. When we got home, we opened the door to find every pillow we owned strewn around the apartment. Forensic testing later showed that the pillows had been thrown as the victim sprinted backwards through the apartment towards the door. A faint outline of Mill's body hurled against the inside of the door gave a chilling hint of how close Amy had come to never escaping at all.
Don and Stacy (pseudonyms) were cat people, with a feline terrorist of their own. (Hey, do you think the FBI just got notified by an always-active search engine that someone just blogged the word "terrorist"?) Plus there were two of them. ("Them" being Don and Stacy, not FBI agents.) When they needed a place to stay in Toronto, at precisely the same time as we were going away on vacation - that's all we did in Toronto, vacation all the time - well, it just seemed like Providence. One of them - I'm not going to say which one - apparently took quite a shine to wearing my massive Bugs Bunny slippers, which Millhouse wholeheartedly despised. (He loathes all feet in general, never mind feet in slippers with giant eyes and ears.) To this day, we laugh until we cry, at the story of Don (oops, I mean "one of them") trapped on the bed, dancing fearfully in those slippers, while Millhouse malevolently circled the room.
Kelly agreed to check in on him one week, again while we were on vacation. She left a journal of her adventure, which started out with her usual smart 'n sassy, brook-no-nonsense personality. The last journal entry, however, was mostly frightened gibberish, something about "drawing blood". The writing trailed around the page incoherently, instead of her usual tidy, straight lines. We set up a trust fund to help cover the costs of her resulting long-term therapy.
Probably the one who suffered the most, though, was Norm....
