"My Pretty Pony" is a short story written by Stephen King and illustrated by the artist Barbara Kruger.
An elderly man, his death rapidly approaching, takes his young grandson up onto a hill behind his house and gives the boy his pocket watch.
In his note on the story in Nightmares and Dreamscapes, King says the piece was originally a flashback scene included in a full-length novel-in-progress in which the grandson was now a brutal hitman reflecting on his childhood.
The novel was intended to be published under King's Richard Bachman pseudonym, but the author grew disenchanted with the work, and finally scrapped it entirely.
King references this concept again in the "Sorry, Right Number" screenplay (also collected in Nightmares and Dreamscapes), where a direction states that a character's "pretty pony has done its fair share of running" (indicating that they have aged relatively rapidly).