When women no longer came to the forest, the wolf grew lonely.

     He continued to wait for them on the winding forest path as he always had, but as the centuries passed, fewer women came. And the ones who appeared were different from before. Some ignored his well-rehearsed questions about their itineraries with a shrug or a cool cutting away of the eyes. Others laughed. "Still here?" they teased.

     The wolf resolved to live away from humans. But the forest around him shrank as civilization expanded until one day he found himself on the edges of a town. And still no women approached him with the wonder that sparked his own.

     During the day he hid near a golf course where the caddie, a man hunched over from years of carrying bags, left scraps for him, pieces of dinners that club members pushed away in displays of competitive denial. And during the night, he slinked through neighborhoods and business districts, resting on lawns and lots with front paws crossed, waiting. But the women passed him in their fortress cars, hard tires splashing gutter water on him.

****

     In front of the office building, she flicked her cigarette away with a gesture made stylish by contempt. Day after day, year after year, she held her pattern—hours spent excelling at the hated job and then going home alone or making postures in stuffy clubs to impress dull people. All part of the game: the grin and groan, the climb and leap, the step and kick of modern life, forever striving upwards. "Excel or else," was her mantra.

     Yet in the privacy of her corner office, she would grimace as migraine flashes burned through her head. But she forced herself forward through the pain. Vulnerability was a sin in the twenty-first century.

     After stamping out the dying cigarette, she marched to her car at the far end of the lot. She was proud of those long days and nights, comparing herself to her employees who went home to families and hobbies. Let them sleep in their stupid contentment, she thought. I'll take the money, the praise, the status, the titles. Taking out her keys, she prepared to open her car.

     "You want everything because you have nothing."

     She looked up into the eyes of a wolf.

****

     He paced in front of the woman whose face and mind sagged with the cold weight of loneliness. Her mood had none of the humor and curiosity he loved in the women he had known but an anger that turned into a musty smell in his nostrils. The wolf shook his muzzle and snorted.

     "Where are you going?" he asked. "Probably not to grandmother's house."

     "Animals don't talk." The woman tensed for a minute. Then her hand moved toward her purse.

     "Mace or pepper spray, I suppose. Effective on humans, but not on me."

     Her foot lashed out at him, four inches of heel just missing his eye. The wolf was old but his reflexes still worked and he leapt to the side with his storybook grace.

     "Get back, I know judo," she snapped, fumbling for the car door.

     "I'm sure you do," he said. "Human life is a kick in the head after all." His tone shifted to amused acid.

     She found the unlock button on her keychain and slid across the car's leather seats.

     "You have nothing and the more nothingness you consume the less you will live," said the wolf, now sitting up on his haunches. "But it's not too late. We should talk."

     The woman slammed the door, started the engine, and backed up, running over an orange traffic cone. The car rounded the corner, tail lights glaring back at the wolf.

     He watched her leave, wondering if he could still awaken a woman's desires. Twitching his tail, he walked on into the night.

****

     Her heart skipping beats, the woman ran through a red light on the main boulevard. How could this strange animal know about her headaches? And how could it even talk? She had never entertained thoughts of magic or wonder, even in childhood. Flights of fancy didn't earn big money or status, the things that really mattered in her world.

     "That didn't happen," she muttered. Best to forget about it and think instead about the preparation for the next day's presentation.

     At home, she sacrificed dinner for work but couldn't focus on the figures and the charts, the numbers and the hustle. Images of the wolf pressed on her: the sleek, silver-grey body, the red tongue panting between sharp incisors, the amused, knowing eyes.

     There's a man underneath the wolf, she thought. Tapping a pencil in a nervous tattoo on the desk, she traced his image in her mind until she saw the contours of the man, with limbs long and lean, muscles taut, hands gentle.

     Ridiculous. No such thing as werewolves or enchanted princes. Snap out of it. And I don't need to talk to anyone, let alone a creature that talks in riddles. 

     In the later hours as the moon descended, she forced herself to rest, turning on the radio for background noise. The box pumped out manufactured messages, muffling the beat of her desires.

****

     The wolf finished the last of the scraps.

     "You should leave," said the caddie as he watched the clouds.

     "And go where?"

     "North and west of here, where there's still some open land. But if you stay here..." he shook his head. "They'll find you."

     "I'm aware of the hunters." The wolf licked his muzzle. "Don't worry."

     The caddie sighed. He put on his slicker as drops of rain misted into the nearby lake.

*****

     At the presentation, she nodded off, eyelids drooping, then flipping open in fear when she noticed the faces looking back at her with surprise and amusement. She could almost hear their thoughts...after all these years, she's lost her edge...no longer competitive...will have to go with another...

     "I've got good instincts about our new direction," she promised. But her smile felt false and weak. The others said nothing, chairs swiveling as they left.

     She slammed her office door and went downtown to buy another caffeine injection from the coffee shop. In front of the police station, officers and animal control officials surrounded a cage.

     Inside it, the wolf lay still, tranquilized, back rising and falling with shaking breath, fur darkened with rain.

     "If anyone knows about this animal, contact us," said an official to the crowd. "He's an old one. They'll probably put him down."

     I know something, she thought. It talks. But her lips didn't move. Bad enough she had failed her presentation. Believing in talking animals would destroy her credibility. She turned away.

****

     The wolf's tail twitched. His dreams wrestled with longing and terror, for blood and flesh and the ancient play between wolf and woman. But the hunters had come in the

end. That was how the story evolved. First the wolf triumphed, then the hunter. And now the woman walked away, no longer interested in the old story.

     I outlived my purpose, he thought. The women no longer need wolves because they have become them.

     His heart gave one last sideways beat.

****

     The stroke in her brain created loud sparks of light like fireworks blasting. She gasped as her heels wobbled and her legs buckled. The coffee cup fell from her stiff hand.

     As people gathered around her, her outer vision began to fade, replaced by a network of lights which shaped themselves into the pattern of a wolf.

*** 

     In the cage, the wolf's body grew transparent and disappeared.