Майкл Чабон - Along a Frontage Road

The engine came awake with a rumble, and the Firebird went scrabbling out of the lot and back onto the frontage road. Nicky and I watched them drive off. I saw Andre turn back, his eyes wide, his face alight and hollowed with an emotion that I could not help but interpret as reproach. I had abandoned him to a hard fate, one that I might at least have tried, somehow, to prevent. But there was nothing that I could have done. I didn't have any illusions about that. I dressed and fed my child, I washed his body, I saw that he got enough sleep. I had him inoculated, padded his knees and encased the twenty-eight bones of his skull in high-impact plastic when he got on his bicycle and pedalled down our street. But in the end, when the world we have created came to strap him to a table, I could only stand behind the doctors and watch.

I took Nicky's half-grown red runt and balanced it on my palm.

"Hey, Nick," I said. "Listen. You can name it Kate if you want to."

"I don't want it," Nicky said. "I want to get a bigger one."

"All right."

"Kate can have that one."

"All right."

"Because she didn't get to have a pumpkin, since she didn't get to ever be alive."

"Good thinking," I said.

"But I still don't want to cut it up," he said. Then he went back again into the world of pumpkins, looking for the one that would best suit his unknown purposes.

The New Yorker, November 19, 2001