Latest Stories

Most recently published stories on Vocal.

XOXO
XOXO was released to Netflix on August 26, 2016. Six strangers come from around the USA to attend the music festival called XOXO. What comes is a day of and night of partying, drug trips, dates, fights, love, happiness, and an opportunity of a lifetime. The most important thing about the film is it is a character film. The main plot is the festival but it’s the ensemble that drives the story. We focus on the individual lives of Ethan, Krystal, Shannie, Ray, Neil, and Tariq. During the pandemic of 2020, music festivals and concerts had been either cancelled or postponed so it is nice and bittersweet to see lots of people in a group dancing and having a good time.
By Melissa Clarkabout 18 hours ago in Geeks
Why Writing Gets Hard Right Before It Gets Good
I almost quit three days before my breakthrough. A little while ago, I'd been writing daily for two months, and it was hard (impossible, brutal, exhausting) the entire time. But around week eight, it became unbearable.
By Ellen Francesabout 18 hours ago in Writers
In The Everlasting Swamp
It happened weeks ago now, but I still don’t know what to make of it. Whether it was true, or a dream, or whether those are one and the same thing.
By I. D. Reevesabout 18 hours ago in Horror
The Stories We Don't Tell: How History Becomes a House Built on Bones . AI-Generated.
We build our histories like we build our houses—selectively, carefully, arranging the rooms to tell a story we can live with. The foundation is laid with documents and dates, the walls erected with heroes and victories, the windows placed to let in light on certain events while leaving others in shadow. We furnish the interior with the stories we are proud to tell, and we close the doors to the rooms that hold what we would rather forget. Then we invite our children to live in this house and call it truth.
By HAADIabout 18 hours ago in History
sunshine in my pockets
what’s crinklin inside? fistfulsa flowers, sunshine daisies n paisleys!
By Thomas Bryantabout 18 hours ago in Poets
The Weight We Carry: Why Confession Is the Bravest Thing We Never Do . AI-Generated.
We are born honest. Watch any child and you will see it—the unedited self, the unfiltered expression, the truth spoken before the social brain learns to censor. A child points at the stranger and says what they see. A child declares their love and their hatred in the same breath. A child cries when hurt and laughs when delighted, with no thought to how they appear, no calculation of what others will think. This is our original state: transparent, authentic, free.
By HAADIabout 18 hours ago in Chapters
The Inheritance We Never Asked For: Carrying the Wounds Our Parents Couldn't Heal . AI-Generated.
We inherit more than we know. More than the color of our eyes, the shape of our hands, the tendency toward certain illnesses. More than the furniture passed down, the photo albums stored in attics, the recipes written in hands we barely remember. We inherit something invisible and weighty—the wounds our parents could not heal, the fears they could not name, the patterns they could not break. And we carry these inheritances inside us, often without knowing, until one day we realize that we are living out a script we never chose, written by people we never fully knew.
By HAADIabout 18 hours ago in Families
The Price of the Paper: How a Single Test Became the Measure of a Child's Worth . AI-Generated.
The night before the test, she could not sleep. She lay in the dark, her mind racing through formulas and dates and vocabulary words, silently rehearsing, silently praying that she would remember, that she would not freeze, that she would be enough. Her parents had said all the right things—just do your best, it's not the end of the world, we love you no matter what. But she knew. She knew that this paper, this single morning, this collection of questions written by strangers, would somehow determine her future. She knew because the whole world had told her so, in a thousand ways, since she was old enough to understand what tests mean.
By HAADIabout 18 hours ago in Education
The Chapter You Didn't Choose: Finding Meaning in the Pages You Never Wanted to Write . AI-Generated.
We imagine our lives as books we are writing, and in that imagining, we place ourselves as authors. We will choose the plot, we believe. We will decide when chapters end and new ones begin. We will shape the narrative into something coherent, meaningful, perhaps even beautiful. This belief sustains us through ordinary difficulties, through the expected transitions of growing up, leaving home, finding love, building work, raising children, growing old. These chapters we understand. They are the ones we signed up for.
By HAADIabout 18 hours ago in Chapters
Where It Feels When You Speak Me
Thoughts of me feel safest inside the words you are poised to free from void Your voice more velvet than volume
By The Dani Writerabout 18 hours ago in Poets
Sailing the Seven Seas with You
“Beyond the Sea” is the English version of the French song “La Mer” by Charles Trenet. It was popularized by the American singer and actor Bobby Darrin in 1959 and remains the best-known version. The song charted on the Billboard Hot 100 and R&B charts as well as the UK Singles chart.
By Rasma Raistersabout 18 hours ago in Beat
A System That Forgets the People Inside It
The first time someone tries to ask for help, they don't do it because they want to. They do it because they can't keep going the way they have been. Because something inside them cracked quietly, like a fracture no one saw forming. And when they finally gather the courage to say, "I think I need to talk to someone," the mental health system answers with its favorite line:
By Lydia martinezabout 18 hours ago in Humans