Loukoumas

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.** Now, it is morning...

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.