Loukoumas

The Great Sausage Chase THE STORY SO FAR It is a quarter past three in the morning in Mrs Evdokia's flat in Kypseli. Everybody is asleep. Everybody except one. Loukoumas — a plump, overweight European Shorthair with short legs, enormous eyes and an unappeasable love of cured meats — has been woken by a rumble in his own stomach. Mrs Evdokia has put him on a diet, and the house is no longer his: a robot vacuum patrols the floors all night, and her canary, the Tweety-Boxer, has the run of every room. Loukoumas starts in the basement with one intention: to climb all the way up to the kitchen and open the big two-door Pitsos. And he finds it empty. The last one, the big one, went to school in the lunchbox of Myrto, Mrs Evdokia's granddaughter. Outside, the school bus is starting its engine. From there it stops being a raid and becomes a chase, and it lasts another nineteen rooms: out through the back yard, across the neighbourhood, through the whole school, into the vet's — and home over the rooftops and down the chimney into his own fireplace, where Myrto has left him a bowl of milk.