"Because Linda, I'm not a leopard" he said, without trying to hide the anger in his voice.

"What's Wrong Tim? You used to always love being a leopard for me." she said as she removed her turtle mask and sat on the bed next to him, placing the whip between her thighs. 

"I just don't feel like a leopard anymore." his voice cracked as he spoke and he felt gross and wrong inside like someone had thrown up in his butt. The edge of her turtle shell poked him in his side and the mattress creaked as she shifted her weight.

"Tim this is one of the pillars of our marriage.." She she said in a hushed tone. He stood and walked to the window. It was raining. It seemed to be always raining now. It had been like this for a while. He wasn't sure where these feelings had begun and it frighten him to imagine where they would end. The water covered everything from his perspective. The world was wet. The world was wet because the sky was bleeding out. The rain seem less like gentle pitter patter but more like the avalanche of stones throw from an angry mob. The crushing feet of a thousand dancing bloody babies.

Their role playing, no it was more than that, it had been more real than either of them was without it. A leopard wanders upon a slow turtle, vulnerable despite her fortified shell. The leopard takes from the turtle without permission, without wanting permission and they do not lose themselves in the experience, they become the experience, freeing themselves from the barriers of contradiction by the existence of the thing thing that they, together, created.

They had acted out the fantasy hundreds perhaps thousands of times. Each time it became more thrilling and at the end they'd feel even closer. Sometimes they lost entire days to the dance of leopard and turtle. Not always was the time spent in fornication but in creating the reality. Linda, crawling around for hours in the front yard, wearing only her turtle costume, eating plump strawberries and wriggly earth worms, the bits of which would seem to always stick in one of her back left molars. she knew the dangers of living as a turtle as well and often passerby would see her ducking quickly into her shell when the aerial shadow of a raptor swept across the ground or a car drove by, its tremors alerting her of the danger.

Tim adorned in a leopard tail and ears, body painted, would climb trees and stalk prey. During one hunting trip, in an alley, he had fought an opossum to the death, using only his teeth and claws. Then he drug his kill to the high point of the tree in his backyard and feasted. The resulting rabies shots were expensive and the process of purging himself from the parasitic infection was unpleasant but he had never felt more like a leopard.

They were a savage pair.

They had tried to share the experience with others, showing them, hoping they would understand. They didn't. Friends abandoned them, family members disowned them. They felt with that thing within that is more than simple knowledge that if only the world could have this, if it could share this with them, then it would change. They found out in the hardest of ways that the world wasn't ready.

He smudged his leopard whiskers with a tear drenched hand. "I just don't feel like a leopard anymore Linda" he repeated.

"It'll come back Tim. You just have to try. Try for us!" He knew it wouldn't. It wouldn't come back. Those days were over, and his marriage was over. The days of thunder had come and gone. Now the sky was quiet and empty, except for the gentle rain that only through a hateful verisimilitude seemed gentle. Someone had puked in his butt and the world was wrong. The world wasn't wrong because someone puked in his butt. Someone puked in his butt because the world was wrong.

"Well there's not much else to do now." he said grabbing some isopropyl alcohol from the bathroom and a yellow and blue lighter from the dresser. He doused the curtains in a white arc and lit them. The fire came strong into the world. It was warm.

"what will you do Linda?" 

" I think I'll stay. I'm a part of this after all." She said stoically, but also with a certain supreme earnest as she stared into the growing flames.

"Trufe." Tim said trufe now. He'd been saying it since he started the curtain fire. The man dressed like a leopard who didn't feel like a leopard didn't stay to watch the fire. Someone had puked in his butt, and it was because the world was wrong.