SALVE ROMA! A Felidae Novel - By Akif Pirincci Page 0,63

the old pews, everything around me sank into a sea of blazing brightness. In the end the gold fog also covered me, and I hovered through the gleaming mist directly into the land of the dreams.

I walked through the catacombs again. But although no torches were burning this time, I didn’t miss light. Everything lay clear and visible in front of me, even the smallest details were spared from shadows. I started to realize, that the walk, which my paws did like due to a hypnotic order, couldn’t actually be happening inside a catacomb. It was a cave which had ups and downs and mysterious narrowings and then again sections, which felt strangely greasy. I felt a slowly rising tension inside of me, which how I believed was supposed to prepare me for something real special. This numb feeling mixed with fear, but nothing stopped me from going on like a fanatic search dog, without the slightest clue of what or whom I was hunting. Eventually my route ended at a sandy-yellow membrane, which embraced the passage without a gap. It looked like someone had built a wall with one of these modern super synthetic materials. Without further thought, I bared the sharpest claw on my right paw and cut a clean hole in the elastic material. Then I slipped through and found myself in a very bizarre, snow-white room. The inventory in it remembered of the installation of a hypermodern artist. A gigantic construct in the shape of a snail, from whose shell grew some kind of crown with semicircular arches, hovered from the ceiling. A long connecting cable branched off the mysterious thing and petered out to the range of the room. In the upper range the membrane more and more took the shape of a beak, whereat the material fluently transformed into cartilage, and then from cartilage into bone. Finally the beak docked on the snail with the help of fine little bones. Some of the objects shimmered in the color of very tender meat, and underneath their surface I could see thousands of little blood vessels in which blood pulsated.

Then something wonderful happened. As if blinds, which had been closed for centuries, had just pushed open and finally offered a clear sight on the bright day, I suddenly realized that I was neither in hell nor in an art gallery. I was standing in the insight of an ear, in fact in one of these brands, which are at my kind’s disposal. In my dream, I had shrunken to the size of a flea and had taken a walk through a felidae-ear. The route, that I had taken, was the auditory canal, and the membrane was the eardrum. The snail with its ossicles and the resonator actually looks like a snail in real life and is called cochlea. And the crown was the balance system and vestibular organ ...

I slowed down instinctively. Why hadn’t I noticed this earlier? I, Francis, who knew our kind’s anatomy so well that I could have easily habilitated in it. The inner ear wasn’t just responsible for the hearing. In humans as well as in animals it hosts the most precious sense of all, namely the sense of balance. Just that the sense of balance of the felidae is in the same proportion to that of humans as a Formula One car to a Trabant. In other words: If a human had a vestibular organ like us, he could perform far more reckless maneuvers than a trapeze artist ...

I wanted to go further into this question, when I slowed down another time. The reason was a barely hearable lapping behind my back, which made my fur stay on end. Although it was an ordinary noise, it sounded inexpressibly ugly, yes almost filthy. I turned around and choked in horror.

Like in my last dream, the leading role was again played by Antonio’s coldhearted master. He wore a pastel-colored disco suit from the Seventies with wide lapel and flared pants, and he was sitting in the pope’s wheelchair. The partially unbuttoned shirt again exposed his hairy chest with a dangling silver-cross. Through the big dark sunglasses he smiled at me maliciously. This time, the flawlessly tanned, a thick cigar sucking macho didn’t really come into question as an affable guest in a retro show. Because dark bullet holes gaped at the right sleeve of his jacket and at the left pant leg, from which real streams of blood had poured across the pretty