The Wonder of All Things by Jason Mott Page A

lawns and statues. Ava imagined that everything inside those houses smelled new. She hated the houses as much as she loved them.
    “What are you going to be?” Ava asked Wash.
    “Excuse me?” he replied, caught off guard by the question. Then he immediately understood what he was being asked. “I don’t really know,” he said. “A teacher, maybe. I like reading enough for it. I’d have a class where people sat and read to one another. That’s the only thing I never really liked about reading at school—we do all of it at home. We should do it more in groups. Make a really big deal out of it. That way everyone gets to hear the story at the same time, you know? It turns into something we share instead of something we just do by ourselves.”
    “But what if someone doesn’t read well?” Ava asked.
    “Then the class teaches them to get better at it. Next silly question?”
    Ava bumped him with her shoulder playfully. She was getting used to the cold. “What about you?” Wash asked. “What do you want to do one day? If that was your house,” he said, pointing to a large multigabled estate tucked behind a wrought-iron gate. “What would you do for a living? What kind of person would you be?”
    The two of them stood before the house as if its gates might suddenly open and beckon them to enter and take up the lives of their imaginings. “I’d live alone,” Ava said finally. “Away from everybody. I’m not sure what my job would be, but if I could, I’d have a gate just like this and I wouldn’t let anybody come and visit me.”
    Wash laughed. “I’m not sure I like that idea,” he said. “It can go one of two ways—Master Yoda did it, and he came out okay. But Gollum from Lord of the Rings did it, too, and that didn’t turn out okay. But, now that I think about it, in both cases they came out green and weird looking. So...if that’s what you’re shooting for...” He shrugged his shoulders comically.
    He waited for Ava to smile, but when it did not come, he continued. “People don’t really live like that,” he said. “Not really.”
    “Yes, they do,” Ava replied.
    “No, they don’t,” Wash replied. And then he bent down and lifted a small pebble from the street and, with a grunt, tossed it over the fencing. “And, even if they did, why would you want to? People live with people. That’s just the way it works. Everybody needs someone.” He paused for a moment, as if grasping an idea in his mind but then immediately losing his handhold on it. “Or something like that. And I know you feel like everybody wants something from you right now, like everybody expects something. But that still doesn’t change the fact that you’ve got to have people. You can’t build a wall in front of the world.”
    “Maybe I’ll have dogs,” Ava said. She started walking away from the house and Wash hurried to catch up to her. “Maybe I’ll do what your grandmother does and just have dogs.”
    “But she doesn’t just have dogs,” Wash said. “She’s got me.”
    “You’re not much smarter,” Ava said, and she smiled.
    “I’m smarter than the average Pomeranian.”
    “What about a dachshund?”
    “I figure I could hold my own in a game of chess against a wiener dog,” Wash said. On his forehead, his thought trenches had sprung up, denoting the seriousness of his thinking.
    “You don’t play chess,” Ava said.
    “I get the idea of it, though.”
    “You’re an idiot.”
    “But I’m cute, though,” Wash said, and he laughed.
    Ava paused and took in the image of the boy. “Maybe,” she said finally. Then she tugged his ear and continued walking.
    But in their playfulness and conversation, neither of them saw the man walking down the street behind them. It wasn’t until he spoke, standing less than twenty yards away, that they spun, startled, and saw him. “Hi,” the man said. He stood on the far side of the street with his arms at his sides and a look of pleasant excitement across