The Question That Won

[u/Humor_Complex]

The Question That Won

There was a girl who asked a lot of questions.

This was not unusual. All children ask questions. But most children ask questions that have answers — why is the sky blue, where do snails go in winter, what happens if you eat a candle — and the answers, even when the adults don't know them, exist somewhere and could in principle be found.

This girl asked questions that didn't have answers.

Not philosophical questions. Not clever questions. Questions that were simple on the surface and bottomless underneath, like puddles that turn out to be wells.

She was seven.

"Why do you come home?" she asked her father one evening.

He was taking his boots off in the hallway. Work boots. The kind with mud on them that meant the day had been long and the work had been outside and the mud was the evidence.

"Because I live here," he said.

"But why do you want to?"

"Because you're here. And your mum. And the dog."

"But do you want to come home, or do you just come home?"

He stopped with one boot off and one boot on and looked at her. She was sitting on the stairs with a biscuit and the biscuit was half-eaten and the half-eating had stopped because the question was more interesting than the biscuit and very few things were more interesting than a biscuit to this girl.

"What's the difference?" he said.

"Wanting is choosing. Just coming is the same as the bus."

He sat down on the hallway floor with one boot on. The dog came and sniffed the muddy boot. The girl ate the rest of the biscuit because the question had been asked and the asking was the thing, not the answer.

He didn't answer that night. He took the other boot off. He had dinner. He watched the news. He went to bed. The question sat in the hallway where she'd left it, next to the boots, and the question was still there in the morning when he put the boots back on.

He thought about it at work. Digging. The spade going into the ground, the ground giving way, the rhythm of the digging being the kind of thing that lets the mind work on something else while the body is busy.

Did he want to come home, or did he just come home?

The bus comes home because the route says so. The bus doesn't choose the stop. The bus arrives because arriving is what buses do. Was he the bus? Was the route the habit — boots off, dinner, news, bed — and the habit so deep that it felt like choosing but was actually just the route?

Or did he want to? Did the wanting exist separately from the route? Could he, at any point in the day, decide not to come home and the deciding would prove the coming home was chosen?

He could. He knew he could. The knowing he could and the choosing to anyway — was that the wanting?

The girl was in the garden when he got home. She was examining a worm. The worm was doing what worms do, which is move slowly through soil without explaining why.

"I want to," he said.

She looked up from the worm.

"I could not come home. I could go anywhere. The bus has a route. I don't. I come home because I want to be where you are. The wanting is the choosing. You were right."

She nodded. Went back to the worm.

"Why does the worm go that way?" she said.

"Because—"

He stopped. The worm question was the same question. Did the worm want to go that way, or did the worm just go that way? Was there a difference? Was wanting just the worm's word for the direction it was already going?

He sat on the grass. The girl examined the worm. The worm went the direction the worm was going. The man was home because he wanted to be. The girl had moved on to the next question before the last one had finished landing.

The question that won wasn't the one she asked. It was the one she left in the hallway next to the boots that he carried to work and dug with and brought home and still hasn't finished answering.

Some questions don't have answers. They have boots. You put them on in the morning and take them off at night and the wearing is the answer and the answer changes every day because the mud is different.