A work of art moves us by being honest and that honesty is apparent in its language and its form and in its resistance to concealment.

As we’ve been saying, the story form is ruthlessly efficient. Everything in a story should be to purpose. Our working assumption is that nothing exists in a story by chance or merely to serve some documentary function. Every element should be a little poem, freighted with subtle meaning that is in connection with the story’s purpose.

A linked pair of writing dictums: “Don’t make things happen for no reason” and “Having made something happen, make it matter.

It’s quite beautiful. The story has increased its meaning into its very last line, and even into the white space afterward. As we’ve said good endings do, this one creates an entire future world of different, plausible possibilities.

But that’s really all a story is: a series of things that happen in sequence, in which we can discern a pattern of causality.