Cats at Law

Under a moon that drips like molten silver, two velvet-pawed felons—whiskers twitching to the syncopation of alley-cat jazz—scale the shadowed façade of a tenement where every cornice curls like a baroque mustache. Their target: not bullion, not gems, but a wheel of Parmigiano whose perfume drifts through cracked plaster like an aria of temptation. A bull-terrier constable—badge glinting like a fallen star—patrols below, his tail a metronome of civic virtue. Inside, the cats crack the Frigidaire cathedral; hinges squeal in ecclesiastical horror. The cheese, lunar in heft, is smuggled beneath trench-coat tails, but a single squeak betrays them. Pursuit erupts: cobblestones become piano keys, moonlight a strobe over Expressionist rooftops. Hauled into a courtroom whose oak reeks of mothballs and moral certitude, the thieves face a beak-nosed judge whose gavel is a guillotine for feline hubris. Equitable partition is decreed; yet the clerk—human appetite incarnate—carves clandestine slivers until only rind remains, a parable of scarcity etched in wax. The gavel falls; quarrel turns costly, cheese evaporates, and the cats exit with nothing save the sour epiphany that discord is the most exorbitant tariff of all.