Ftrain, by Paul Ford

This is another death I have imagined. [Wife] and I have conceived a child and I am taking the child, still very young, to the park. But I am struck by a car--hit and run--and killed. Wife is called and is told I am dead, and how; she asks: where is the child?

"What child?" ask the police. "There was no one else with him."

This is the single-worst thing I have ever imagined. Even the camps would be better, somehow, than this idea of absence. People, not I, have been though much worse. There is a scene in The Fugitive by Massimo Carlotto—supposedly true—in which a friend of the author, Odile, takes her four-year-old, Julio, on the Mexico City subway, and the child's hand slips away in the press of a crowd and then the child is gone. No amount of searching can bring him back. Someone had need of a four-year-old child in Mexico City. You cannot conceive of what, but you cannot help but imagine. With enough imagination and books every breath is a risk, a reason for fear.

Weight: 312.5 lbs