Winter
2025-2026
A Mile In His Shoes
Stellarum Sudhoff
12th Grade
Short Story​
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Runners, on your marks!
The announcer's voice echoed in my head, rattling around like a marble. I readied myself, but an eternity passed before the gun finally fired. I lost my footing for a second; terrible start, I thought to myself, but it didn't matter. I was going to win, I had to. I had to.
The soles of the shoes hugged my feet like an embrace, one I needed right now, but not right now. Maybe right now, actually. But not right now. I'm running from that, or maybe for it. Busy running. But it still didn't feel like I was in his shoes. I didn't feel like him. I wasn't him. I'm not.
The shoes weren't his, they were mine now, but I was his, and what was mine was his, so maybe they were still his. It didn't feel like I was him, though; the shoes were more a lesson. A memory. It felt like he was there. It was less being him and more being with him. He's here, I thought, running beside me.
A little faster, I imagined him encouraging. You've got more in you.
My feet thumped along the track at the end of the first lap. I passed another runner. then another. I saw his face in a couple, but I knew getting distracted here would be my downfall. The second lap came and went and I felt the taste of blood in my mouth, and for a second, the saliva drying in the back of my throat tasted like his and not mine.
I passed the rest of the runners by the end of the third lap, and I thought of his end; I thought it was my end, too, that day. But the cool april air still stung my cheeks; the rhythmic tapping of my feet still reached my ears. I was still here. But it should have been me. He would have been even faster than me, right? Maybe he would have beaten me in this race just to hold it over my head. I wouldn't have been able to get angry at him for it, though. I smiled at the thought.
I readied for my final sprint, and my chest already felt like it would explode. Such is how it is to run, to live, to love, to die. I collapsed dramatically over the finish line and rolled into the grass, far ahead of the other runners, and I thought I felt his lips on mine one last time. That's all I wanted right now, truly, to trade his breath for mine, to trade his run for mine, to trade his life for mine.
AND SO THE SNAKE EATS ITS OWN TAIL: mediations on deja vu
Anonymous
Poetry
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and so i find myself:
poised on the steps, first words extemporaneous but the sentence ends rehearsed. i stumble on the next stair. this to, is where i already was.
and so i find myself:
the cup is in the sink and suddenly i know it is time for me to look up. i do. i feel sick with the weight saturation in my own mundane form of predestination.
and so i find myself:
driving later than i should, words fumbling for fear. my friend does not understand. i know he will not. i keep trying in the ways i know i will until i run out of lines. i fall silent. i keep driving.
and so i find myself:
where I was left in a dream.
and so i find myself:
in stairwells and sinks and on cool countertops, waiting patiently to be picked up again, waiting for predestined motions to be enacted by a mind altered.
and so i find myself:
walking into a world unconscious, stuttering and uneasy and i know its wrong but it can’t happen any other way.
and so i find myself:
i see it coming a split second before it happens, always. i could turn away, try to alter fate, but i never do. it’s less of a choice and more of inevitability.
and so i find myself:
eating my own tail.
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Getting Better
Lilly Heinz
11th Grade
Visual Arts
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Theseus's Ship
Amalia Weix
11th Grade
Poetry
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my thought experiments always seem to go wrong
you say that’s just the nature of labs
but when the only variable is thought
it feels less like entropy
and more like a lack of control over the only thing i truly own
somedays my mind is as strange to me as my body
an alien space governed by alien rules
not mine
not yours either
but still not mine.
theseus drove his ship to wreck
replacing broken parts but never fixing the rot
so it just spread
until he died
the ship remained
he is dead
but the ship remained
decayed particles living on in the bellies of fish
in the atoms of algae
something that was never alive
will never die
the ship remains
every part of it.
if i live i will die but what part of me is living
my heart beats my brain sparks
but if my mind evades me
my body betrays me
where is the seam between these ephemeral systems and my mutable self
what is the line that splits
how does the soul jettison the corpse
when the mind finally stutters to a halt
it will kill my body
but will my soul remain
i will be dead
but what part stays the same
what strange energy persists
what part of me unliving never dies
will i line the bellies of fish
compose the hearts of future stars
or be hewn eternal in the souls of others
memory that unknowable particle
parts of myself brushed onto the shoulders of passing strangers
buried given stolen lost
maybe the soul does not leave
maybe it leaves the body in one thousand small ways
dissipating like dry ice
taken in by others and converted into something new
maybe a soul sustains itself on others
our patchworks hearts stitching in new swathes as quickly as they wear out
maybe that is death
when you have given all there is to give
when your hands grow weary of stitching
when you lay down your needle
pass your work to the world
your work
your soul
you
something that was never alive
will never die
but when i do
i will remain
every part of me.
The world will end in five days
Lilly Heinz
11th Grade
Poetry
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Did you know that the world is gonna end in five days?
the rain will dry up, the cats will puke on the carpet, and no one will know where we came from
Where did we come from?
our parents of course, but who was there before that?
who held each other in that tight sweaty way people did when they loved each other
did love even exist back then?
It doesn’t matter anyways.
the cats have begun to hack their hearts up, falling in broken pieces that stain the carpet.
damn it all to hell, that's going to be impossible to scrub out.
who cares about one thousand years ago, the world is going to end in five days.
It’s not like anyone would understand, this is something that hasn’t happened ever before.
but it has, hasn’t it? It happened yesterday, the world ended then too.
the world is still here, in a way. Razed to the ground, yes, but still here.
what does it mean to end?
It doesn't matter.
the carpet is broken, the cats are all dried up, the puke is impossible to scrub out.
Yea, I think the world will end in five days.
This Is About Something Else
Amalia Weix
11th Grade
Short Story
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“I am not your daughter,” your daughter says.
It is not the first time you have heard this, but it is the first time you have heard it from her. The other parents whispered as she hatched first and grew strong, stronger than their own spawn, stronger than you. They speak of warped forms and garbled songs. They name your daughter an intruder, but you have always ignored them as the fools they are.
Your daughter is elegant, her form sweeping and powerful. Her songs are not garbled, merely unfamiliar to those who did not raise her. She may not speak in the tongue of your childhood, but she is your child, so you recognize it all the same. Her fledgling songs grew wings all their own, and some simply do not know how to look up.
“I am not your daughter,” your daughter warns, when she is the only one you have.
The others did not survive, melted away like slush in springtime while she bloomed. It is not the first time you have lost your children, and it will not be the last. There was one year where every chick withered in its egg, another when they were mauled by jays, countless graves planted only in your heart.
You know what your daughter did and you do not care so long as she survives. She does not understand it, even though it is staggeringly simple. You raised her. She is yours. There is no other factor to consider. She could rip your heart from your chest and swallow it whole and you would not fault her so long as it kept her own beating, her belly full.
Your daughter does not understand this sacrifice, not yet. She does not understand the careful arithmetic of parents, the way that sometimes, you must burn one child if you wish for any to survive at all. She is young, and has not yet grown into her heritage of loss.
You hope she never will. You pray she lives through soft rains and beautiful things and grows beyond your ken. You pray her vast wings will be carried on warm breezes, cradling updrafts soothing her when you no longer can. You pray your daughter lives, and you do not care how she does it.
There is no price too great.
She is yours.
With Great Respect and Numerous Apologies to Keith Leonard
Amalia Weix
11th Grade
Poetry
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Listen, he said. That’s where language ends.
I can no longer sleep on my side. It is not for lack of want or trying—see, my entire childhood I slept on my side. It was familiar. It was comfortable. It was born of fear, but it was what I knew. I would tuck myself into a comma, ear covered and eyes squeezed shut, waiting for sleep to find me.
In recent months, it has deserted me, replaced by an unnameable pulse. Threats come not from outside, but within. My body betrays me, the ideal of thought muddled by the inherent inadequacies of flesh. You cannot perfect the imperfect.
The brain is a failable organ. I do not know when the mistranslations began, all I know is that they continue. Each night I hear a roaring and see no beasts. Each night there is an ocean, and my mouth is dry. Each night I shift until the fluids reach some unknowable equilibrium, and know I have robbed myself of comfort.
I could split myself open, but I cannot contort myself to see the problem. It would require layers of mirrors and artifice and how would I explain the necessity? How could I communicate the urgency? The world is ending. It is always ending. Waves crash inside my head and salt drips through my teeth. You need to listen. You need to listen because I cannot hear.
There is no certainty, there is no truth, there is no verdict for in life, for there is no court. You sleep soundly until you cannot. You are a child until you are grown. Adolescence is demarcated by a series of mutations that induct you into a world that is exactly the same as when you were younger, save the fact that you know, now, that it will never make sense, and there is an ocean in your head, and you can no longer sleep on your side.
Listen, he said. That’s where language ends.