The story unfolds

but it only unfolds after you have lived with it for a long time, bargained pieces of it away in exchange for new space, new possibilities.  A story I have now written four times has, at last, lost its tenuous webbing and false bridges.  It has come unto its own.  I traded a 40 year old woman for a 14 year old girl.  I took retrospect and made it present time.  I took two elderly women and gave them a boy to raise.  I took darkness and pierced it with light.  I have thirty pages yet to write....