The Deal of a Lifetime and Other Stories

Fredrik Backman

She was five. I met her a week ago. There was a small red chair
in the hospital TV room, it was hers. It wasn’t red when she
arrived, but she could see that it wanted to be. It took twentytwo boxes of crayons but that didn’t matter, she could afford it,
everyone here gave her crayons all the time. As though she
could draw away her illness, color away the needles and the
drugs. She knew that wasn’t possible, of course, she was a smart
kid, but she pretended for their sakes.