SALVE ROMA! A Felidae Novel - By Akif Pirincci Page 0,12

reached the gallery. There I was expected from a bunch of diversely colored hair, which swung and drifted back and forth like on high seas. Like it was my style, of course it didn’t occur to me to queue up in a well-behaved manner and wait for my turn. To be honest, I was scared I would drop dead from exhaustion if I had to wait in line.

Recklessly I squeezed and pushed myself forward through my colleagues, which didn’t quite make me the store sign of my home country. I didn’t worry about communication problems in the case someone in line gave me a hard time because of my rude behavior. As we all spoke the very same language everywhere in the world. Though, colored by different regional and rural dialects.

Little by little I began to see the center of the crowd behind all these heads and straightened up ears: a little uncrowded circle, which everyone was headed to. Meanwhile my mouth wasn’t just watering, the spit actually dripped from its corners. I somewhat found it irritating though that despite of the banquet and the expectable friction in front of us my fellow (almost-) crowd surfers were in a rather subdued mood. Nobody hissed at his neighbor in pure jealousy about food or even dealed out, and nobody made a sound. It seemed like everyone had a rough time. There was no backlash when I pushed someone aside, they just put up with it.

Eventually I found the reason of this reservation. Just then the last rays of the descending sun disappeared. Darkness sank onto Largo Argentina and blanked out not only the artful details of the site but also the buzzing noise of the traffic around us, yes, every sound, until there was a creepy dead silence. I struggled through the crowd until I reached the first row, but what I saw in the center was not the demanded grande bouffee but a dead body that couldn’t have been any worse mutilated. It was a Siamese sister. She had the typical dark mask-like face, which reached from the snout to the forehead covered by vanilla fur. Ears, legs and her tail were shadowed, too. Out of this beautiful silhouette azure blue eyes stood proud – widened and frozen.

She lay there as if she had curled up for a nap in the midday heat and had fallen fast asleep. Something so cruel proved that this didn’t accord to reality that the sheer sight of it threatened to madden me. On the left side of her head, where the auricle usually is located, gaped a hole in the size of a child’s fist. But not just the ear itself was missing but the whole part of the head that covered the ear canal, the eardrum, the ossicles, the cochlea and all those nerve pathways, which lead to the brain. All gone! The smashed skullcap seemed like it had been blown up and revealed a bloody abyss where one could see the rose matter of a demolished brain, tiny bone splinters and some layer of slime. A monster couldn’t have had caused worse devastation.

My eyes filled up with the first hot tears and a shiver took control of my body like abruptly the south had just turned into the coldest north.

»Scusi, Signore!« I suddenly heard a voice from behind my back out of the circle of those who were still alive. I turned around and looked into a face that was cluttered with scars and grooves due to countless fights and untreated infections. Out of this smoke-colored war theater two bright cupreous eyes stared right back at me.

»You seem to be a foreigner, Signore, and you have probably never seen anything like this«, they gray stranger said, whose whole appearance reminded of a down feather explosion. »But here in Rome such sights aren’t rare events.«

»You’re wrong, Signore«, I replied, while tears streamed down towards my snout and dripped off my head. »I have seen things like that before. But I had a deal with God that he wouldn’t show me anything like it ever again. But as usual he didn’t keep his word.«

4.

Meanwhile darkness had taken possession of the whole temple complex, though here and there violet cirrostratus clouds glimmered in the sky. The constant buzzing of the traffic had lessened and only now and then the annoying honking and bawling of motorbikes interrupted the almost-silence. The crowd around the dead body began to break up. Only a few could bare the sad