The Wonder of All Things by Jason Mott

practitioner of a small town, had built a house here before all of the new money came. And over the years he’d gotten by well enough that, even though his house was visibly more fatigued than the rest standing along the street, he’d kept it up enough that it did not seem out of place among all of the newness.
    Privacy fences wrapped each of the yards along the street, including the doctor’s, but Ava had been to Dr. Arnold’s enough times over the years to know which of the boards in his fencing were loose enough to be pushed aside and slipped past. Every six months, like clockwork, Macon came to Dr. Arnold for a general checkup. He had always been a man that believed in the power of preventative medicine. And while he underwent the checkup, Ava, when she had answered all of Delores’s questions and eaten her fill of the woman’s food, would come into the backyard, slide through the loose board in the fencing and explore the large expensive houses of Highland Street.
    Now, after leaving Carmen in Dr. Arnold’s examining room, and with Wash racing after her, Ava came out of the house, crossed the yard at a lope, wriggled through the loose board in the fencing and started up a narrow, wooded path that, eventually, emptied out again on Highland Street several houses down. It was a discreet enough path that anyone unfamiliar with the town, such as reporters, would not have been able to see her, and yet it afforded her the safety of having a way to get back to Dr. Arnold’s if someone did find her and she needed to get away from them.
    She was hot with anger and the coolness of the day did nothing to detract from it. Only the sound of Wash, stumbling and panting as he struggled to catch up to her, did anything to relax the girl. “Ava,” Wash called out. “What are you doing? Where are you going?” he barked in pain as a tree limb Ava pushed aside suddenly snapped back and slapped him across the face. “That was straight out of the Three Stooges, ” he said, and there was a strange pride in his voice. In spite of the gravitas and bedlam swirling in the world around them, it was only the comedy of the moment that the boy cared to acknowledge.
    She did not want to go far—with all of the people that had come to town, she was afraid of what might happen if she strayed too far away from the Arnold house. But she needed air. She needed to be away from things. She needed to be alone...or as close to alone as she could get. And Wash had the uncanny ability to make her feel like she was away from everyone, but not alone in this world.
    So it was with some degree of comfort that she made her way through the wooded path, around the back of the houses, and returned to the openness of Highland Avenue.
    “Jeez,” Wash said, coming out of the bramble behind her. There was a large red mark on his cheek where the tree branch had smacked him. He rubbed it with the palm of his hand to soothe it. “Is it as bad as I think it is?” he asked, presenting his face to Ava.
    Ava held back her laugh. “It looks like you got punched by a feather duster.”
    “Funny,” Wash said, but there was lightness in his reply. He rubbed his cheek a little more, then looked back and forth along Highland Street. It was empty and quiet. Ava turned on her heel, and began slowly walking up the street.
    “You do realize,” Wash began, falling into step beside her, “we shouldn’t be out here. You know how everyone is. There’s no telling what kind of people we might run into. There’s a reason you have police escorts now.”
    Ava tucked her hands into her jacket pockets. The cold that lingered within her since waking up in the hospital tightened its grip on her. She straightened her back and tensed her jaw to keep her teeth from chattering. Then she walked and looked at the large houses lining the street.
    They were grand and majestic. They had swimming pools—empty now in preparation for the winter—wrought-iron gates, sweeping, pristine