The God Children

Nobody grieves what they've become.

David is nine the summer his father hands him a cedar shingle on the roof of the family cabin and tells him to learn the difference between what's real and what only looks real. He doesn't know yet how much he'll need that lesson.

Then the world begins, gently, to improve. One by one, the people David loves choose to become better: sharper, calmer, kinder on the surface. One by one, they lose the ability to reach for things they aren't sure they'll find. His mother, a brilliant professor who once laughed when she lost a sentence mid-lecture, finally accepts the tool she's wanted her whole life. She stops saying I don't know, isn't that wonderful? and starts giving answers that are always correct.

No one forces anything. That's what makes it unbearable. Every change comes with warmth, good reasons, and love.

At eighteen, David is offered a full scholarship with one condition. Saying no means a smaller, slower, lonelier life. Saying yes means becoming someone he'll never miss being.

David is a story about what's lost when progress arrives with kindness and the chain of ordinary people who keep something from falling so that one day, others will have somewhere to stand.