Stories of your Life and Others by Ted Chiang

Chiang loves the sad; in each of these stories he worked in a central element of loss / betrayal / destruction.

It'll be when you first learn to walk that I get daily demonstrations of the asymmetry in our relationship. You'll be incessantly running off somewhere, and each time you walk into a door frame or scrape your knee, the pain feels like it's my own. It'll be like growing an errant limb, an extension of myself whose sensory nerves report pain just fine, but whose motor nerves don't convey my commands at all. It's so unfair: I'm going to give birth to an animated voodoo doll of myself. I didn't see this in the contract when I signed up. Was this part of the deal?

Though it is funny to see how much of a negative superreaction I go through when reading a story that attempts to be smart, and then fails. Mention "understand" to me, and you'll get a good rant.