January 2025 Winning Features

Congratulations to our January 2025 Winning Features! These stories caught our eye, and we hope you enjoy them as well.

Do you think you have a 100 word story in you? Follow the weekly blog posts and enter each week or submit today via the form below for a chance to be published or featured.

Erin Copland

Erin Copland is a writer and reader living in the Washington, DC area. You can come watch her repost things on Bluesky @erincopland.bsky.social.

100 Word Feature

Monthly Submission - via form

In Which I Try To Be A Good Atheist

I’d like to look at the painting longer, but my aunt finds it disgusting. Beautifully slaughtered meats are prominent in the foreground – in the background: the Nativity scene.

My aunt prays for me. She prays for our family, for Ukraine, for feral cats. She prays with her neck bent, eyes closed, frowning as if God is whispering to her. She listens.

Later, in a different museum, my aunt tells our group that I can interpret paintings, find meaning in them, like you see on TV. They all turn to me, waiting. Trusting me to be the best version of myself.

100 Word Feature

Online Submission - via weekly participation

Mrs. Anderson

He was so tiny, the little boy. A real terror. The kind that makes you shake your head and laugh.

His mother, my neighbor, used to push him outside like a wild dog, always another baby on her hip.

I didn’t drive very often. Mostly to the Piggly Wiggly and back.

When I saw the cardboard box sitting in the middle of the road, I stopped to pick it up. He was sitting underneath it, said he wanted to know how it would feel to get hit by a car.

I remember how he held my hand while I cried.

Michelle Meyer

Michelle Meyer is the author of The Trouble with Being a Childless Only Child (Cornerstone Press, 2024) and The Book of She (2021). Her poem, “The Circus Girl,” won the 2024 WFOP Triad Ekphrastic Challenge, and individual poems have appeared in Autumn Sky Poetry Daily, ONE ART, Pearl Press, Tiny Spoon, and elsewhere. This is her first flash fiction publication.

Congratulations again, December 2024 Winning Features!

We had a lot of interest, and it was difficult to whittle this down! Please keep the stories coming either through weekly participation on the blog or via the form (limited to one entry per month). Thank you to all who participated and entered! Keep writing and help spread the word to come lay down ink…

December 2024 Feature Winners

#100WW Use the hashtags and share on social! #comelaydownink

We nominate for awards, including Best of The Net.

Alternatively, we also have a New Submission Form for 100-Word Stories. These submissions will all be considered for publication online and in our print mag.

You can submit only one story per month via the form. However, you can participate each Wednesday on the blog in addition to one monthly submission.

On the first Wednesday of each month, we will publish 2 selected 100 Word Stories (1 from submissions and 1 entry from the 100 Word Wednesday weekly prompt here on the blog.)

Read other entries and comment. This will be a positive forum for feedback.