The whole house is silent and then we hear the most mournful mewing.
It sounds very disturbing, like a cat in terrible distress.  One of us
gets up and tries to find the crying kitty, and it turns out to be
Cleo.   She is not in distress at all.  She is standing in the middle
of the hallway holding a toy mousie in her mouth by the scruff of it's
furry black neck.  (How she carries the mouse and mews at the same
time is a mystery, but she manages it somehow.)  As soon as she
realizes one of us humans is looking at her she drops the mousie and
begins grooming it.    

I know what you're thinking right now.  "How sweet, she's pretending
it's her kitten."  But there is more to the story, and it is strange.

Cleo will spend about five minutes grooming that black mousie.  During
this time we usually go on about our business because Cleo will stop
playing if we watch her.  She is a queenly sort of cat and thinks
playing might look unseemly for a queen.  But one day I caught sight
of the end of the grooming and what happened next was somewhat odd.  
She stood up, cocked her head to one side, puffed out her fur, got
that "I know that mousie moved" look in her eye and gave it a
tremendous wack with one paw.  She gave a little sideways leap and a
"meroup" of joy and then proceeded to beat the crud out of it up and
down the hallway.

Cleo has decided that one, and only one, of the many mousies in the
house is hers.  It's covered in solid black fake fur and has a
rat-like face with a tiny red nose on the end of it's long pointy
snout.  It's a little bigger than most toy mousies which only makes it
look more rat-like to me.  Sometimes it is Cleo's personal mouse toy
or sometimes a substitute for a long lost kitten that she never
forgot.  I call it Mousiekitten.  
Debra in VA