David is a fourteen-year-old boy whose family has recently moved from Olinger to Firetown. As he sits in the new house, he thinks about how misplaced everything feels, and he notices his parents' books. He picks up a copy of H.G. Wells's An Outline of History and begins to flip through it. He gets to the section on the life of Jesus Christ, which refers to him as a man who survived a crucifixion then died a few weeks later, only to be mythologized by his followers. David takes issue with this reading of Jesus, and does not understand how anyone could remove Jesus's divinity from the narrative. Thus begins a crisis of faith for David, and the boy starts to question if heaven and God truly exist. The next Sunday, David goes to his catechetical class and is excited to ask his questions to Reverend Dobson. David questions what happens between death and the Second Coming, and the reverend is stumped by the question. He tells David that nothing happens after death until the Second Coming, and the boy is not satisfied by this answer. He becomes embarrassed, though the reverend is the one acting like a coward. After he goes home, David begins to read out of his grandfather's bible, and his mother sees him. She asks him what he is doing and tells him she noticed something has been bothering him. David tells his mother about his crisis of faith, and his mother attempts to answer his questions, but ends up saying that these problems will not matter so much when he is older. David becomes angry with his mother, and when his father comes home, his mother announces to the family that David is worried about death. David does not read after that incident, and is too concerned that a new crisis will come up the more he reads. For his fifteenth birthday, his parents buy him a shotgun, and shooting cans becomes David's new hobby. One day, David's grandmother asks David to shoot the pigeons that have overtaken the barn because they ruin the furniture, and David agrees, though he does not want to kill the animals. David shoots six pigeons in the barn, and scares the rest off. When he goes to bury the birds, he realizes how beautiful and unique each one is, and wonders why God would give the pests such beauty. As he lays the pigeons in the ground he realizes why he must die: God cannot let David live forever and destroy his whole beautiful Creation.