A man catches sightof a baby buggy on an Irish beach. It’s facing the sea, and he can’t tell if there’s a baby in it. He also can’t figure out if the clump of people he’s spotted further down the beach has anything to do with it. Is the buggy—and the possible child within it—now his responsibility? In his new story, Roddy Doyle draws a portrait of an older man who feels that he’s lost the certainty and the sureness that once seemed integral to his identity. Years earlier, as the father of small children, he’d had no hesitation about the sometimes quotidian, sometimes terrifying aspects of taking care of kids. That version of the protagonist would have known exactly what to do. Now everything seems to give him pause. “The Buggy” is about a brief moment in time, but Doyle is able to fit a whole life into it—and make you hope that the man looking out at the beach is able to find a glimmer of his younger self. —Cressida Leyshon, deputy fiction editor | 
