Talking Tom Cat Designer
Control
The streets hummed with neon static as Mouse slipped through the fractured glow, a shadow strung between alleyways. His boots barely whispered against rain-slick concrete, fingers brushing the data-chip hidden in his sleeve—his ticket out of this labyrinth or a one-way plunge into something worse. Above, surveillance drones sliced the smog like mechanical sharks, but he’d learned their patterns, the gaps in their hunger. He wasn’t fast, wasn’t strong, just a ghost who knew how to fold himself into the city’s blind spots. The chip burned against his skin, secrets coiled tight. Someone would come for it. They always did. Mouse grinned, teeth catching the dim light. Let them. He’d already mapped every exit.
c
Tom smoothed the ivory silk across his drafting table, whiskers twitching as he visualized the cascade of fabric against his wife’s silhouette. His toolbox yawned open—steel shears gleamed beside spools of gold thread, a pincushion bristling with needles, and charcoal pencils sharpened to fine points. He tucked a swatch of lace from their wedding gown into his apron pocket for luck before sketching a bodice with scalloped edges, the lines flowing into a trumpet skirt. Measurements memorized from years of tracing her form guided his hands as he cut precise panels, fingers dancing across the sewing machine’s lever. Each stitch became a secret—pearl buttons at the cuffs for her love of the ocean, a hidden pocket stitched beneath the sash for trinkets their kittens might gift her. When he presented the gown at dusk, the way her eyes lit up brighter than the rhinestone brooch at the collar told him every threaded heartbeat had been worth the silence of the studio.
