Last week The Drabble accepted a short story I wrote. You can read it here, though to be accurate I shouldn’t really say “short story.” The Drabble is a website that publishes works of prose and poetry 100 words or less—works of “flash fiction.” My piece was inspired by students who have recently been making presentations, and by the fact that another class just finished a unit on Edgar Allan Poe. Combine those two, and you have a story of exactly 99 words. It’s supposed to be funny and I hope you enjoy it.

That will go up on the “Narrative” tab of our site, perhaps alongside more fiction in the future. Now on a related note: “It was a dark and stormy night”—that’s how the very real novel Paul Clifford opens, written in 1830 by Edward Bulwer-Lytton. The actual sentence goes on and on, and has become so recognized as a piece of hackneyed (and subsequently clichéd) prose that it spawned The Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest. People submit long opening sentences to imaginary novels, with a focus on awfulness. They’re a type of drabble, in a way. 2017 winners have been announced and a lot might make you laugh. Or groan. Or both, probably.

–Jeff and Leah