Years ago I taught a short story by Michael Cunningham in which a teenager runs through a sliding glass door during a party. (This was before building codes required tempered glass in such doors—a change triggered by a real life incident of a child bleeding out from cuts sustained by running through such a door.) In the story, the boy stands in the middle of broken glass and pulls a shard of glass from his neck. Moments later he bleeds out in the arms of his girlfriend. Every year students would bargain with that: What if he hadn’t pulled out the glass? What if someone had put more pressure on the wound? What if…? Just as in real life, we sometimes bargain with outcomes we cannot bear. Even in fiction.