Mystery of the Shrinking Portraits

All was quiet last November, and the portraits in the hallway of Clay Hall stared stoically at each other and kept a wary eye on the crowds of students. Beneath all the hubbub, no one noticed a quark spontaneously spring into existence. The quark floated quietly around until suddenly it struck another quark, and then a lepton, and then another quark, slowly accumulating momentum. A few hadrons later, and suddenly an atom was formed with a frame of electrons surrounding its small but spunky nucleus. 

Thus, the atom snowballed into other atoms and coalesced into a dust mote. If you were walking at just the right moment and the sunlight caught it at just the right angle, you could see the light glint brightly off of it for a split second. As it drifted dangerously and drew other dust motes into its orbit, eventually a teeny-tiny picture emerged with the slenderest of frames surrounding an as-yet imperceptible picture. If the portrait of Dean Jeffries had been paying close attention, it would have seen a fly notice this uber-dust mote. The fly droned over to the picture and poked at it curiously. If the portraits watched the fly, they would have seen the picture absorb the fickle fly while at the same time they would have noticed the frames of their own portraits shrink towards them ever so slowly. Having grown several sizes that day, the discerning observer could now see a small picture of Dean Goluboff looking back at them from the ever-growing portrait. 

A week passed, and suddenly the portrait had grown immensely as it fed off the size of the other portraits in the hallway, which shrank proportionately, until it was suitable to be unveiled in the ceremony. By the time the spring semester rolled around, the other portraits in the hallway were looking like printer paper-sized portraits and Dean Goluboff’s colossus was covering the view of Spies from the west wing of Clay Hall. One would have thought the school would hear a protest from the living past Deans Kendrick, Jeffries, and Mahoney, but strangely, no one has seen them recently. 

Editor’s Note: After returning from spring break, it has been brought to our attention that there is no longer a Clay Hall and, instead, there is a monolith of Dean Goluboff blocking the space between Slaughter Hall and Walter Brown Hall. 

Author: Andrew Moore ’28