I first noticed it on the bus home from school one day. I was hunched over in my seat as usual, listening to the other kids talking and staring at the streaks of grime on the windows, when I caught something reflected in the edge of my glasses. I squinted. Fur. Soft, smooth fur, like the fur by the edge of a cat's eye. I looked sideways, wondering where the reflection could be coming from. Nothing I could see. Though the day was hot I shuddered. Creepy.

Still, I have a talent for accepting the supernatural. Comes of growing up in a haunted house,I guess. As a kid I was aware that things vanished, simply stopped being where I had put them and showed up years later, or never. No matter how treasured an object was, it could suddenly cease to exist. Doors were opened and closed, lights turned on or off, and I learned to just shrug it off. The most obvious suspect for vanished treasures and mysterious changes in the house was my mother, but she always disclaimed any knowlege. For years I simply accepted that I lived with a ghost.There was that one time that we searched for an hour for Tina's wallet, asking my mom several times if she knew where it was until she grew impatient in her denials, before finding the wallet in my mother's purse. Perhaps the ghost was my mother's memory. It didn't really matter, though. The effect was the same. I knew the lie of cause and effect, I had grown up in a house in which things simply-- happened.

So I shrugged off the wolf in my glasses, didn't really think about it. I had enough to worry about with school.

I saw it again the next day. Looked at it for the whole ride home. This time I could make out the edge of a deep liquid eye. It made me think of wolves running through forests, of pools silent and dark in the night, of the euphoria of cool wind on my skin when I was supposed to be home in bed. My back hurt from scrunching in the seat as I thought about running shrieking through the woods as a kid. It was a million years ago.

Sometimes I got home and was filled with restless anxious energy, had to run several times around the house or pound a tennis ball against a wall for an hour. Not the thrilling fear of a kid in the woods at night, but the anxious energy of a teenager filled me, I blushed remembering insults from others and my own stupid mistakes. The adults who called me sir or young man, the kids who laughed and cast glances like spittle at me from the back of the room, seeing an awful mark on me that I couldn't see myself. The kids who once spit at me as I scuttled to find my own bus, I had sunk down in a seat and put a shaking hand to my head to find the stickiness of their contempt. They were right, of course, they had proven my own worthlessness to me with their phlegm. The memory made me want to crawl into a hole or slam my head through the wall, which I pounded with that tennis ball instead.

The wolf that kept me company on the bus rides home was a relief. So maybe I was going crazy. I didn't mind the wolf. Like the skull I was to find in my dormitory door years later, and the thoughtful girl in the ceiling fan of my first apartment, the wolf was restful. He-- for I was sure that he was as male as my beloved cat-- made no demands on me. He simply sat, and watched. When I was a kid I saw signs and omens regularly. My cat once offered to lead me into another world, there was the shiny disk of the sun on the day of my first surgery and the driverless car we saw after a day in the woods one evening. I hadn't seen any magic in years, so I welcomed the wolf.

I don't remember exactly what happened the day that I solved the mystery. Was it one of the days that I fought tears in the parking lot, or one of more ordinary misery, filled with thoughts of reflections off knives? It might have been one of the rainy days that reminded me that each drop of water has condensed from the body of a corpse, that this earth is heavy with spirits, we would have to go to the moon to experience the lightness of an atmosphere not filled with ghosts. I don't know.

But I do remember that one day, watching the wolf in my glasses, I recognized a fur as an eyelash, a smoothness as skin. And suddenly, like the collapse of an optical illusion, I knew that the wolf was the reflection of my own eye. Of the delicate hairs of my face. Of my own body.

And in that moment, that collapse of illusion, disapointment. I do remember disapointment. Another haunted house disproven. Another sign pointing to nothing. Another ghost dispelled.

And me left alone on the bus going home from school again.