A Cat's Life

In a cramped, dust-moted tenement where gaslight bleeds through cracked plaster, a swaggering tomcat—tail flicking like a conductor’s baton—presides over a micro-kingdom of cruelty. His whiskers twitch in syncopated malice while a trembling mouse, shackled by thread-thin twine, totters under the weight of an ivory thimble-crown, forced to polish the feline’s ebony claws with a discarded toothbrush. Between bouts of sadistic whimsy the cat slinks onto a moon-rotted rooftop, crooning a rasping serenade to a languid white persian whose eyes are twin crescents of disdain; her purr is a velvet insult, her tail a dismissive comma punctuating his every vowel of longing. Spurned yet intoxicated, the tom retreats to his attic atelier and drafts a baroque contraption: a Rube-Goldberg mousetrap whose mahogany gears, champagne-bottle springs and razor-sharp copper teeth promise to transmute squeaks into silence. When the trap snaps—its sound a metallic haiku—the mouse’s terror ricochets through floorboards and into the alley, where streetlamps shudder like guilty bystanders. But the cat’s triumph curdles: the persian, witness to the bloodless carnage, turns her gaze toward a silent, soot-covered stray on a distant fence, leaving the tyrant alone with the echo of his own opera of domination, a monarch over ashes.