He had to bottle-feed the leopard every few hours. It’s like having a baby, he said: getting up in the night, wrapping the little body in a blanket, and waiting for it to relax and become dead weight in your arms. I asked if I could pay the leopard a visit. He said there was too much risk I’d pass on a disease.

It seems relevant to mention that we lived on the ninth floor of an apartment block. The carpark was a popular location for drug deals, and a body had once been dumped in the lane that separated our building from the next. Real estate agents always claimed that this part of town was ‘going places’. Going where, I wondered.

I saw my neighbour almost every day in the months after he brought the leopard home. His beard grew out, and a faint, pissy smell wafted from his clothing.

‘How’s the leopard?’ I’d ask. He’d answer in one-word descriptions: ‘restless’, ‘irritable’. Once he said ‘depressed’, and I imagined the juvenile leopard sulking on my neighbour’s couch, watching re-runs in the dark.

Then I didn’t see my neighbour anymore.

I began to worry. I knocked on his door. I knocked for three days in a row, calling, ‘Hello? Hello? Is anyone there?’

That third day, I saw a shadow pass in the gap between the door and the carpet, and heard a noise, muffled, a sort of wumph – like someone sliding down a wall and slumping on the floor.

My neighbour had given me a spare key, in case of emergencies. The following day, I used it – I threw a raw steak into his hallway, and slid a bucket filled with water in after it. Then I slammed the door.

I did the same thing the next day, and the next. And we went on like this. Because something kept taking my offerings, and something kept wumphing and shuffling and pacing in that apartment.

Maybe I should have called the police. But I didn’t want to get my neighbour into trouble. Besides, I liked the idea of having a leopard next door – someone who stayed up nights, like me; someone else who knew they were in the wrong place but didn’t know how to get out.

Tongue-Tied

I knew it was her before she turned around. Gym teachers, unlike other teachers, don’t know their students seated and face-forward. We know their proportions, their ratio of muscle to fat, the smell of their feet, of their unwashed groins and underarms. We know their limits.