The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards by Kristopher Jansma Page A

you know Mitchell King ?”
    “Who, Mitch?” I say, fumbling a Savannah accent—I can only fake it now. “Oh, why . . . we went to school together down in North Carolina. Benedictine Academy. Go Cadets .”
    Amy giggles and eyes the bluebells. “I like your little flowers.”
    “Why, thank you kindly, miss. My name’s Simon,” I lie, extending a hand to hers. She grips it, ladylike, and I glance at the mirror before I ask her, “Would you like to come with me to the zoo this afternoon? Have you ever seen the leopards?”

Note: The following is reprinted with permission from the Vicksburg Review.
—C.E.E-B.
4
Anton and I
“What truth? You see where truth is, and where untruth is, but I seem to have lost my sight and see nothing.”
—ANTON CHEKHOV, THE CHERRY ORCHARD
    Winter winds howled through Union Square and snow piled up in the night; there were no pathways, only the backs of benches and the tops of trash cans. Streetlights bent up like periscopes from beneath the tundra. The tree branches were limned with white, as were the fire escapes and all the little terra-cotta pots out on them. Each pot sheltered a lump of dead earth and the dry husk of plant life within it. From the window of Anton’s apartment, I sipped some of his golden .Zubrówka vodka and watched three figures crossing the park from different angles, heads bent and trudging slowly, carving lines that would not intersect.
    Rose lay on an Oriental-blue divan by the fireplace, her hair still pinned up from her rehearsal of The Cherry Orchard earlier that day. The only finished copy of my manuscript lay beside her in a heavy yellow hatbox, which I’d borrowed from Anton as a means of transporting my pages to and from the public library each day. Every few moments, Rose pinched the corner of a new page with two fingers, as if it were a beloved photograph, and lifted it from the box. As she read she rubbed her thumb softly against her latest engagement ring. This one was either from His Royal Highness, Umberto, Prince of Greece and Denmark, or from Phillipos the Fifth, of the former Royal Italian House of Savoy. It got so hard to keep track, and I found it easiest to live with myself when I did not know who her suitors were.
    Through the thin paper, an orange glow outlined the shadow of her fingers as they scanned beneath my lines. Her deep brown eyes flitted from side to side; her lips occasionally cracked into a smile that sent my heart thumping, or they crept down into a puzzled frown that twisted my guts until I forced myself to gaze out the window again, hoping she would hurry and deliver me from my misery.
    Then the peaceful crackle of the electric fireplace was interrupted by deathly hacking from the neighboring bedroom. Anton hadn’t been well in weeks. He’d wake up at odd hours and bang around the apartment while Rose and I were entangled in my room across the hall. In the morning we’d find burned-down candles, handkerchiefs stained with phlegm and typewriter ink, and discarded containers of wonton soup like artifacts for us to puzzle over.
    As Rose got to the last page, I looked out into the snowy darkness again. I could still see the immortal statue of General George Washington on his horse. Before its erection, the square had been a potter’s field and, according to the research I’d done for my novel, only the penniless had been buried there, and they’d hung criminals from the elms. Beneath all that snow and concrete and dead grass and damp earth lay the bodies of some twenty thousand nameless men and women—forgotten before they’d even died.
    “Finished,” Rose said, laying the last page on the divan beside her and stretching out like a lioness, satisfied with the day’s kill.
    “And?” I asked, reaching for the bottle of to refill my glass. Each bottle was adorned with a little brown bison and contained a single yellow blade of bison grass from the primeval Białowie.za Forest. Technically illegal in the States, the