Kept

The kind order is dying, and it is taking the roads, the money and the light down with it. High in the rocks above a browning country, Davou Gyang has turned his scattered fellowship into a feeding station — his grandmother's ladle in his hand, soup for whoever climbs the path, marked hands held out and filled.

Then the order makes its last, kindest offer: a humanitarian air-bridge out of the dying interior for pastors and their flocks, the language of shepherding borrowed whole. What kind of shepherd, they ask, keeps his sheep in a burning field?

The field really is burning. The planes really do carry the sick. Davou has spent his small life learning to tell the true light from the one that is almost the same — and at the airstrip table, asked for his answer, he gives the only one he has ever had.