The Rebirth of Wonder by Lawrence Watt-Evans

listen to old Ms. Yeager bitching at him.
    He had completed his work on one wall of the
prop room the day before; anything that had rotted, rusted, or torn
he had pulled out and thrown in the trashcan, and the rest he had
sorted out and put away again, using a fat felt-tip marker to label
the boxes as clearly as he could.
    All the prop guns were in one box, prop
swords in another, prop knives in a third – except that that one
particular wooden one with the peeling paint had never turned
up.
    He would have thought that someone had walked
off with it, but that would mean that someone else had been down
here, and that didn't make sense. No one had been down here while
he was here, and the place was locked the rest of the time.
    The stupid thing had probably gotten tangled
in something and put in the wrong box.
    It didn't matter, anyway. He was here because
he had to be. It made no difference to him or to anybody else if
some moldy old prop was mislaid.
    Stepping up onto the steel frame against the
stone wall at the outer end of the room, he reached up and pulled
an unmarked box off the top shelf.
    It was heavier than he expected, and he
almost dropped it. Carefully, he held it over his head as he
lowered himself to the floor. When he was standing safely on
bedrock once again, he lowered the box and opened the flaps.
    Junk. Old toys, mostly. He wondered what play
they were from.
    He reached in and pulled
an item out at random, and found himself holding an old Star Wars action figure,
a worn and battered storm trooper.
    He smiled. He'd gotten one of these when he
was a kid, when he was five or six years old and they'd just come
out. He'd named it Charlie, Charlie the Stormtrooper, and he and
Charlie had fought long wars against invisible Nazis on the floor
of his bedroom.
    He'd lost Charlie years ago, of course.
    This one looked just like Charlie. Of course,
all these mass-produced figures looked alike, but this one even
seemed to be worn in the same places, had the same crooked angle to
its head from getting bashed against the headboard of his bed
during a brief period of Nazi success.
    A coincidence.
    He put the storm trooper aside and reached
into the box.
    A seashell, a shell the size of his fist –
just like one he'd picked up on Cape Cod one summer. His father had
told him what kind it was, but he didn't remember; a whelk, maybe?
Whatever it was, it was about the most intact shell he'd ever found
anywhere on the New England coast.
    This one looked just like it.
    He held it to his ear and listened in wonder
to the roar of the sea – though he knew it was really the echo of
his own bloodstream pumping.
    He lowered it again and stared at it.
    What had happened to that old shell of his,
anyway? It had disappeared once when he cleaned his room, and never
turned up again.
    Strange coincidence, the shell and the
stormtrooper both looking so familiar. He reached into the box
again.
    When his hand came back out, it slowed, and
then stopped, his third discovery dangling before him.
    It was Bear.
    There was absolutely no possibility of a
coincidence or a mistake; this was Bear, the ratty, mildewed teddy
bear he had adored as a child, and then relinquished in an
impromptu ceremony when he started first grade. The left hind foot
was torn, and the pink patch his mother had sewn on had never quite
covered the tear; the button eyes didn't match exactly because one
was a replacement; a narrow wedge of the dark brown plush was pale
gray where bleach had been spilled on it once in the laundry
room.
    It was, beyond any question, his very own
Bear.
    What the hell was it
doing here ?
    Was this really Charlie, then? And his own
lost seashell? He dumped the box out on the floor and began pawing
through its contents.
    Several minutes later he sat back, confused
and furious.
    Everything in the box was something he had
lost, something that had once been beloved and magical. Practically
everything he had ever loved and had lost was in there. There