In his haunting short story "

My Pretty Pony

," Stephen King delivers a chilling rumination on mortality and the irreversible passage of time, framed not as a supernatural horror but as an existential one. The narrative centers on an elderly, dying man who imparts a final, grim lesson to his young grandson while fixing an old pocket watch. Using the metaphor, "Time is a pretty pony with a wicked heart," the grandfather explains how time gallops past relentlessly, stealing moments and memories while tricking us into thinking we have control. The story serves as a stark reminder of the inevitability of death and the cold, unfeeling nature of time, making it one of King's more profound, albeit deeply somber, non-supernatural tales. It was collected in the 1993 anthology Nightmares & Dreamscapes and published as a unique, visually-driven art book with illustrations by Barbara Kruger.