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Into this place of darkness, the night, this corridor, rolling like a leopard's shadow, a streak, through the jungle, light pouring spotted patterns through the leaves. Cheryl knows nothing of the jungle and the leopards who live there, only what she's seen in her sister's books - square solid windows siphoned from her sister's shelves, opening to fall through, her body rocking.

Her sister, Kitty, fiddles with gold hoop earrings. "Why does that tard always get to come into my room!"

And the woman who is setting out the tea things says nothing, but makes the china cups sing like bells.

"It's not like she can read!" Kitty shouts, the golden posts prodding the thin rips of pierced flesh. "Can't she go rock back and forth someplace else?"

Kitty has a boyfriend now. He pulls up in the driveway and honks his horn. Her hand presses all the way along the curves of her sweater, just as if it's a tongue smoothing her, as if she were a spotted leopard, readying herself to leap, and then she is gone, the echo of a door, the growl of an engine.

The dappled paint of light showers the man's smiling face at the end of the corridor. It is because Kitty has a boyfriend now, because Cheryl did something wrong, that everything has had to change.

This man is tall, taller than any man she's ever seen, and his chest is as wide as the sky. When he speaks, his voice explodes like a bomb in a deep well, and his hands are so big that her eyes can only take them in, one finger at a time.

"Where are we, today, Cheryl?" he asks, "Any places I can visit with you?" They are absurd questions, because he knows she can not speak, but she likes the sound of them. She likes the sound of his big black chair and the creak of the other chair he pulls up. He lets her spin in this one, around and around, like a pony on a pole at the carnival.

"Do you feel like drawing?" he asks after a little while, and she knows in his desk there are swathes of manila paper and boxes of brand new crayons all with their colourful witch's hats still in tact. She imagines each crayon a sorceress and silently reads their names - periwinkle blue, salmon pink, copper maroon - she marks the pages with their conversations and draws a leopard and jungle fronds in the wide corners.

"You're an artist," the giant man barks. His voice has become visible now, it moves in convex waves through the air, his breath smells like bay berries, his flesh does as well. "I like this beautiful leopard." He touches the waxy chestnut spots.

She knows his eyes are watching her that he wants to see how she will take the compliment. Two of the colourful witches discuss it:

"He wants to see what she'll do," one says in a solid streak of brick red.

"He wants to see if she hears him," says the other, an arc of yellow flaring across the page. "She's pretending not to."

These two sorceresses go back in their box and another two emerge.

"He is trying to trick her," whispers the burnt umber in a faint line. "He is trying to make her talk."

"She likes him," the magenta spirals crazily. "Would it really be so bad if she spoke?"

The manila page shakes under Cheryl's straining fists. These two sorceresses have created cyclones that are trying to swallow everything away.

"Stop," the man says, "leave the leopard." His large hands glide through the air like birds. They land on her hands and her body jolts, just as if she has received an electrical shock.

"I didn't mean to scare you," he says. Her face is imprinted with betrayal. "I just wanted to look at the leopard a little longer."

He takes the paper away from her. He holds it up into the air. "Why do you suppose a leopard would want to crawl way up there?" After several minutes of contemplation, he lowers the paper. "I want to keep this leopard, if that's all right with you. I'm going to hang him on my wall, right here." He retrieves some tape from his desk, and with four neatly torn portions sticks the scribbled paper on his wall. "I wonder, leopard, why you hide way up there?" he says. This time he addresses the picture directly.

Cheryl swivels and swivels in her chair. She closes her eyes. She feels light and shadow dance over her face.

"Do you want to draw another picture?" the man asks. But Cheryl ignores the paper he produces, she ignores the pretty box of screaming witches on his desk. "Come colour," they are shrieking, and their voices are frighteningly desperate, but she ignores them and continues spinning, until when she opens her eyes, there is just a blur of the world going round and round, and the man is nothing more than a fuzzy stain, and her stomach is churning like a jagged ocean.

"We'll meet again in a week, Cheryl," the man says. "I'll get to know your leopard in that time, and when you come back I'll tell you everything he's said to me, and maybe you can draw him a friend so he won't have to hang up there all by himself." The man's arm brushes Cheryl's back. It feels like a needle probing the cartilage of her spine. She stares at the leopard stuck to the man's wall, and wishes her hand had not drawn it. "Bad hand, bad hand," she thinks on the way home, but her hand is not cowed. Her hand makes it clear it will draw again. It will draw whatever it wants.
 

Kitty and her boyfriend are in a parked car outside of the house. It is dark, but the streetlight illuminates their silhouettes, moving together and apart like two snakes, becoming one, then two again.

Cheryl watches from her bedroom window. She sees the moon is buried between the branches of an oak, and that right beneath this grave, her sister Kitty and a boy are twisting and twining. The car rocks back and forth, and Cheryl's bad hand follows this motion. It wiggles in the air like a snake. It flaps and thumps on the sill of her window like a heavy bat. It exposes a long bright red scar. Lower and lower the bad hand moves, down until it reaches the midriff of her nightdress.

It is September. The night is hot. The wicked hand lifts then fans her skirt, crawls under it, tears at the elastic of her pink Monday underpants, and claws at the few curls of new hair it finds there. "I can do anything I want to do," the hand is thumping like a heart. "I can push things inside of you and I can take things out of you." It growls like a leopard and then it falls asleep.

Outside, a car door slams, an engine starts, quick feet advance along the driveway, but Cheryl is not disturbed by these. It is the noise of Kitty's bright red face she fears will wake the sleeping leopard.

Downstairs, a cloud of words drifts through the house: "You shame me," a woman's voice is saying.

"I shame you?" Kitty's voice asks.

The words merge and multiply and swirl like cyclones through the ceiling. "Cheryl," her name is whipped in a grey locket of breath.

She knows it is because of her that Kitty won't bring her boyfriend in. But it isn't really her. It isn't her. It is her hand... the bad hand... and the sleeping leopard who possesses it.

"All you have to do is make sure you lock things away," the woman is saying.

"I'll make sure I leave a knife right outside of her bedroom door!" Kitty hisses.

"I never thought you could be so cruel," the woman whispers.
 

When Cheryl sees the man next, she worries that the leopard may have said something. But the man is just as nice. He pulls the big black chair that rocks and swivels right next to his, and pats the seat where he wants her to sit.

"Your leopard is a very loyal creature," he tells her. "He wouldn't say a word to me all week, no matter how much I bribed him. Would you like a cookie?" he asks, in the same breath.

Cheryl's hand moves forward.

"Your leopard didn't seem to fancy these." He puts a cookie into Cheryl's hand, then takes one himself. "I wonder if it's just that leopards don't like chocolate."

Cheryl swivels around and around on the chair as crumbs of chocolate scatter from the cookie and the corners of her mouth. Around and around, as the room dissolves to grey, and the swivelling suddenly comes to a halt. It was a knee, the man's knee, that stopped her.

"Will you colour another picture for me today, Cheryl?" he asks. His knee is touching her knee and she feels the breath from her lungs evaporate. He produces a sheet of manila paper and a box of crayons without moving his leg. He pulls her chair a little closer to his. Cheryl tries to push her chair away, but her strong legs have suddenly turned weak.

"Will you do another leopard?" the man encourages. "Then our friend on the wall will have someone to talk to."

Cheryl feels her knee shake. She feels the trembling move from her knee, up to her thigh and into her stomach. She wants to pull her knee away from the man's, but it seems to be stuck there. The man reaches into the crayon box. He hands her the same chestnut brown crayon she has used to draw the last leopard. Her hand takes the crayon, and the little chestnut sorceress, whose hat has already begun to flatten, immediately begins to wail.

"I can do anything I want to do," the bad hand tells the sorceress as he presses her on the page, and grinds her dwindling cap to nothing.

Another leopard forms through the shrieks and waxy flakes, through the curls of crayon wrapping, just as if its body were devouring the little chestnut witch. Cheryl's hand tears at the paper wrapping around the crayon, the crayon breaks in half.

"This leopard is so much bigger than the last," the man observes. He sounds satisfied, and at last Cheryl draws her knee away.

That night she dreams the man is holding her on his lap, that he is guiding her hand with his hand. She doesn't struggle to get free of him. She likes sitting with him in this way, but then the little chestnut sorceress starts scolding, "Stand up at once!" Her words bounce like fork lightning all over the page.

It isn't as if Cheryl is doing anything wrong, but the nasty little sorceress makes it seem as if she is. "You shame me," the chestnut witch howls in a furious circle. "You shame us all!" The crayon box on the man's desk trembles. Hundreds of accusing witch eyes peek at Cheryl from beneath their colourful conical hats.

"Get off that man's lap right away!" The chestnut line swirls and dashes and ricochets into the corners of the paper, wildly and out of control, in spite of Cheryl, in spite of the man's careful guiding hand

It is the eyes of the colourful sorceresses that wake her. They are staring through the shade of dark ferns and jungle foliage that the trees outside create on her bedroom walls, and then they are not the sorceresses' eyes, but the spotted eyes of leopards, circling the walls, slinking in an underbrush of shadow, trying to camouflage their devouring intentions in the wooden skirting board's immaculate grain.

She pulls the bed sheet over her head. Surrounded by leopards, she is afraid to even breathe. There is no telling what they might do. If they will attack or if, instead, they will grow tired pacing the paint work and fall asleep. Sweat collects in the folds of her night gown and she hears the quick beat of her heart banging like a cymbal in her ears.

"I can push things inside of you, and I can take things out of you." The weight and outline of a leopard are visible on the sheet above her. She closes her eyes so tightly that they sting. Her exhalation is no more than a single feather's breath.

How she wishes she were safe with the man, eating chocolate cookies, spinning on his black chair. He would take the leopard, and hang it on his wall, where it would remain still and mute, muffled by self-consciousness. The man is big, like a giant, with a very loud voice. He's dealt with leopards before. She knows by the way he spoke to hers. He didn't seem afraid at all.

She curls into a small hot ball under the bed sheets, and tries to imagine herself sitting beside him in the swivelling chair. Just thinking of him makes her feel a little easier. She imagines his breath, and his large hand resting against her back. She crawls onto his lap, and sits exactly where she has in her dream. Here, she feels safe enough to sleep until morning. With the first rays of sun, the leopards grow dull and vanish into the walls. All day long Cheryl holds the safe warmth of the man around her and when she ventures into Kitty's room to look at books, Kitty demands to know why she is smiling. It isn't that she expects an answer - she knows Cheryl won't speak.

Cheryl's hands rise together in a triangle and touch her mouth. Her fingers follow the curves of her lips. She wonders if she has become so visible that Kitty can see the man she clings to.

"You look like the cat who swallowed the canary!" Kitty says as she smears pink lip-gloss over her own lips, feeling generous, knowing that her boyfriend will be calling for her soon.

The next time Cheryl sees the man, he sets out five circles of paint: bright blue and sunny yellow, a red that looks like blood, white and black for tinting and shading and a plastic pallet for mixing colours. Beside the pallet, a jar of clear water stands in which three brushes of varying widths await her.

The two leopards that hang on the wall beside the man are pretending to be statues, but Cheryl senses their restlessness. They do not like the thought of a leopard different from themselves, and the shrieks of the colourful witches that emanate from the man's desk drawer make it plain they do not like the idea either. Still, Cheryl feels safe next to the man, and lifts the thickest of the three brushes. She places it first in one colour, then another, and then into the pallet, until the pallet contains the richest and most varied browns and golden browns that Cheryl has ever seen.

The man doesn't ask her to paint a leopard, yet she knows this is what he hopes. The brush slips and slithers across the page, it twists and twirls in her hand She knows the man is watching her.

Neither the din of wailing witches, nor the covert tail swish of the disapproving leopards frighten her from her task. When she is with the man, she is fearless. She imagines the animal she is rendering, divining and stalking its quarry under a canopy of speckled trees and thinks of her own pursuit, searching out this leopard in the nap of paper.

She thinks of Kitty and the boy, how the three of them once sat at the dining room table where she was cutting chains and chains of paper dolls from construction paper.

"What's this?" Kitty asked the boy, holding up a plain white sheet.

"Paper," the boy said.

"No," Kitty responded. "It's a polar bear in a snow storm." The boy grinned.

"What's this?" Kitty asked, holding up a sheet of black paper.

"I give up," said the boy, not having tried at all.

"It's a black cat falling into a black mood at midnight."

Cheryl snipped and snipped with sharp scissors, and pulled the paper open like an accordion. An entire rainbow of dolls stretched out across the table. "Sisters," Cheryl thought.

Kitty continued holding up the coloured paper sheets, her jokes becoming increasingly silly; but Cheryl can not remember what happened after that. She can't remember what she did, if she stuck all the different coloured dolls together with glue, or if she left them separate, lonely in their own brilliance. She can't remember what happened to the dolls afterwards, what became of the paper and the scissors or the grinning boy. She can't remember what her bad hand was thinking about or if the leopards even existed then.
 

The leopard Cheryl is painting now is threatening to become larger than the page. It growls a little, snuffles, opens its claws and scrapes against the hard black surface of the man's desk.

"This leopard needs more paper," the man says, extending another manila sheet, reaching over her, breath touching the back of her neck. He tucks and tapes the paper gently to the other sheet.

The screams of the little witches expire in the drawer. The leopards on the wall begin to tremble. Cheryl's coarse paintbrush kisses the plastic pallet, and in the body of the leopard she begins to expose circles of gold.

"I am made of treasure," the leopard tells her. "Look at my golden spots." The golden spots of the leopard stare out at her.

"Did you know your beautiful spots are just like eyes, leopard?" the man asks.

"I see everything," the leopard whispers.

Cheryl thinks of the man all week. She hears his voice in her head, and when she closes her eyes sees him speaking with her painted leopard. When she dreams, the man is there, guiding her hand over a page, through great sharp blades of forest green into the shadows of her wall, through the fur of a leopard.

"I can push things into you and take things out of you," the leopard growls, "and I have pushed this man so far into you, that you will never get him out."

Cheryl's head throbs, a knot settles in her stomach; when she wakes she feels sick.

At breakfast, when Cheryl doesn't eat, Kitty comments that she must be in love.
 

"Stop upsetting her," the woman mutters.

A cyclone of words swirl about the kitchen table, but Cheryl pays no attention. She is listening to the leopard as the man's large arms close around her like an invisible spotted cloak.

When she sees the man, she knows right away that he has spoken to the painted leopard - that the painted leopard has offered her up, like a space to fill, or a canvas to sketch upon. She looks into the man's eyes and for a moment sees a flash of gold there and the tip of a leopard's tail, grazing out of sight.

For the first time, the man does not encourage her eyes. He looks down at his desk, at the paints and brushes he has so meticulously arranged, while the little sorceresses begin wailing from the darkness of his drawers.

"Your painted leopard and I had a long conversation this week," the man confesses. His eyes are still fixed on the long flat surface of his desk, on the art supplies, and the clear water. "He's such an expressive creature. Just look at his spots." Cheryl looks at her painted leopard. The gold inside the leopard's body sparkles like a million stars. She sees the curve of his body shift and the gentle kneading of his claws. For a moment, she is afraid of what has transpired, of what has been exposed, but the painted leopard has held something back.

The man's large hand comes to rest on her shoulder, and Cheryl slides her black chair close to his. In this proximity, warmth dissolves fear, and in this easy comfort Cheryl wonders what the man would do if she crawled upon his lap.

In an instant, she is there, and the man is sitting very still. His breath is nervous on her neck, but he says nothing, allowing her to lift the brushes from the water and mix golden chestnut colours on her pallet. He doesn't speak to her as she works, he doesn't disturb her in any way, and her hand, the bad hand, streaks the widest paintbrush over the page and high, high up, into the paper's corners.

This leopard she is creating is for the man. He hasn't asked for it, but she wants to give it to him. "I can push things into you and I can take things out of you," she thinks she hears the leopard saying. But she is not sure if it is the leopard speaking or if it's the man, for both of them now have the booming voices of giants, and it feels to her as if this leopard is being extracted from her fingers like drops of blood.

Afterwards, the man allows her on his lap each week. He lets her crawl upon him, push and rub her back against his chest and feel his heart and breath moving in the cage of her body. She knows if she spoke, he would tell her to say nothing. He would want her to keep this to herself, for although she feels perfectly content on his lap, there are others, like the colourful sorceresses in his desk drawers, Kitty and the woman, who would say this was wrong and bad and stop her from seeing the man ever again.

Sometimes she will turn and let her cheek brush against his shoulder, and then lean way, way up, to touch his face with the tip of her tongue. He tastes of leaves and wild lavender and salt, and his whiskers soften under the warm care of her mouth. When she does this, he sits perfectly still, like the smaller crayoned leopards on his wall, pretending not to notice, and later she herself grows still, waiting for his observations, for his eyes that see inside her leopard's spots and divine from them a path.

He tells the leopards about pretension and appearance, he tells them how important it is that they always find a way to vanish and blend in. She does not always understand why he says the things he does, but takes them away with her as she does the taste of his flesh, holds them in the jungle of her thoughts, carries them forward through her shadowed bedroom walls and backwards in time, where she prowls the invisible brilliance of all the stalking silence she has ever had to become.