SALVE ROMA! A Felidae Novel - U.S. Edition Read Free Page B

exchanged some final pleasantry. Eventually, my absence got noticed, too. Gustav worried about that a little, but the villainous guard said that it was quite usual for newcomers, shocked by the change of territory, to hide underneath the platform for the first couple of hours. Hunger would then cause them to leave their hideouts for the food bowls. With that she produced a guttural sound like a hyena in darkest night, which apparently seemed to be wicked laughter. He should care about catching his plane, because usually it would take a short eternity to find his little friend’s hideout in the middle of this mazed arrangement. Gustav kept acting somewhat worried but in his mind seemed to be far away already. In short, he willingly swallowed this Everything-is-fine-message. Or to put it differently: My plan had succeeded. But when he actually showed the impertinence to protest full of hypocritical sadness, that he would have loved to say a dearest goodbye to his beloved Francis, I would have liked nothing better than jumping outside of this damn backpack right into his hippo face, sinking my sharpened claws into it with ultimate passion.

2.
     
    T he end of a friendship must be one of the most painful experiences a sensitive creature can have. Of course this doesn’t mean that one can’t exploit this friendship while it’s going down the drain as long as it’s still useful. Trapped in Gustav’s backpack I followed this motto, squeezed between dirty socks and underwear, which due to their size of a moist sky diving school could have easily rescued me from my misery. Relying on the Night Witch’s calming words far too willingly, my ex-friend had left »Guesthouse Paw« head over heals as if he was getting rid of his sickening grandpa at the nursi ng home.
    But the grandpa was still close on his heals, respectively was stuck in his backpack in the backseat of his Citroën. On the way to the airport I was able to stick my head out a couple of times and watch the highway, which seemed to fly by like a monotonous movie, without being noticed myself. The happily back and forth swinging motions of his neck already showed me that for the driver the dreary monotony was long-forgotten, and so was my humble self. Which even confirmed my resolution! Along the way I thought of the Guesthouse chick’s stupid face when after a long search she still wouldn’t be able to find me in her »establishment« and would begin to sweat over a good answer she would give her customer about his pet’s disappearance about a month fro m now.
    We arrived at the airport, parked at a collective garage and took the escalator to the terminal upstairs. Although I had never entered an airport before I wasn’t really stunned by the giant complex. The school of the public, TV, apparently had robbed me of one of the last tangible adventures. Nonetheless, the mass of humans in front of the check-in desks offered a couple of quite interesting sights. During my longterm togetherness with Gustav I had lost track of his fellow humans’ lifestyles, especially as he wasn’t true to type at all. Now I saw with horror that all of these vacation-hungry, scantily dressed people were tattooed. Incredible, this tacky desecration of the body, which had once been a custom along sailors and prisoners, meanwhile had mutated into an ideal of beauty! In my mind’s eye I traveled through time about thirty or forty years to a nursing home in which old people suffering from Parkinson’s and incontinence kept triggering spontaneous laughter from their nurses due to their withered body paintings on their wrinkled rolls of fat. The employees at the morgues would also have a ball.
    What also stood out was the raging baldness-craze around men, even with guys who weren’t naturally bald at all. Because all of them had their noggins shaved, which didn’t just make them mistakable but in this frequency looked like a still life of deodorant sticks. Had our good old Bruce Willis