Sophie's Choice

I could not watch the film Sophie's Choice now. I probably could have (never did) before I had children, but afterward... no. Even now, just thinking about the plot of the movie, in which a woman must choose which of her two children lives and which one dies, is painful.

I am reminded of this because I'm writing a short (about a thousand words) about a man who must make a choice in a near-future dystopia. It is between his daughter's education and someone's life. In the story as it is now, it is a nameless pedestrian's life. The only way the man can get the injured pedestrian to hospital in time to save him is to spend his daughter's education fund, and he cannot decide what to do.

As I was working, I realized that the story would be more powerful if I replaced the nameless pedestrian with the man's other child, making the story a sort of miniature Sophie's Choice.

I can't write that story.