Some more The New Yorker stories read on the plane back from Chile

Oddly, while I this trip to Chile I read for the The New Yorker's 20 under 40, and the three I read last night were all about children.  ZZ Packer's story Dayward is a chilling chronicle of slave escape.  Much more gruesome than Harriette Robinet.  But still capable of evoking the sentiment of "the best in us".  The reassurance of the children as they reach their aunt's house.  More ambiguous is Twins, by C.E. Morgan.  Great little vignette of the bittersweet world of the child, and the growing realizations and disappointments that the child mind starts to apprehend.  The moments where the early brain clamors for identity and belonging.  And finally The Kid by Salvatore Scibona, a story that felt forced and topical.  A boy is left behind in the airport, deliberately, by his army father, after already having been abandoned by his mother.  A metaphor for whole world regions abandoned as the United States throws its power here and there, willy nilly, with no real accounting of the enormous toll of the dislocations caused?  Not for us to tally, but just to witness?