Katie sighs loudly as her mother lets go of her and sees a puff of condensation leave her mouth. She follows the small cloud with her eyes until it disappears into the atmosphere. Looking up now, she notices the small snowflakes that have started to fall, delicate and light enough to barely make a difference to the amount of snow already covering the ground. Feeling the water seeping through her light green hat onto her head, she knows that her entire head must be covered in snow. Her matching mittens are doing little to protect her from the cold, even within the confines of her coat pockets. She flinches slightly as a snowflake lands directly on her eyelash. Blinking quickly and lowering her gaze from the falling snowflakes, she looks at the trees surrounding them. An assortment of pine, spruce, and fir, she’s sure, though she knows her dad prefers a pine tree as a Christmas tree. 

By Sadie Bengtson

I can’t stand 100 word stories. What are you even supposed to do with so little space? There’s no room for establishing a setting, fleshing out characters, or creating a satisfying conclusion that’s actually distinct from the beginning. I see advice online about how to write them, piles of moving biographies students have submitted to writing contests. They’re all assuming I’ve already found a starting point for the story. Every idea I’ve thought of has proven impossible to compress into such a puny paragraph without twisting the original idea into one that I can barely recognize. Hey, wait a minute.

By Rowan Whitney

It’s not an original observation to make, but why is the school mascot a duck? Sure, the “Crimson Tide” isn’t a very easy concept to make a mascot for, but that just begs the question of why we even picked it. The Alabama Crimson Tide has been using the name 5 years longer than us (1892 for them compared to 1897 for this school), so we just look like a bunch of posers from a state with worse winters. Regardless, Tidey is still stuck paddling in a crimson tide, all alone. I wonder what he thinks about it. Poor, poor guy.

By Rowan Whitney