No One Remembers It That Way

Write about a memory that you and someone else remember completely differently.

Steal From Yourself

Return to something you wrote years ago and use one idea, image, character, or line from it to create something entirely new.

Not on the Menu

Write about something memorable you ate that you'd never find on a restaurant menu.

Frank Racioppi

Edward Swafford

Sam Spinelli

Raistlin Allen

Gina C.

Alexandria Stanwyck

Bugsy Watts

Mackenzie Davis

Sonia Heidi Unruh

Imola Tóth

Paul Stewart

Stephanie Van Orman

Vocal Bonus Leaderboard: 11/04/2026

Welcome to our weekly Leaderboard update! We're delighted to highlight Vocal's most popular stories. Join us as we recognize this week's standout contributors and their remarkable achievements.



Vocal

Dead Air Challenge Winners

Dead Air  brought out some incredibly creative and strange ideas, and we had a lot of fun seeing where everyone took the prompt. From creepy toys and mysterious phone calls to sinister supermarket intercoms and a full-blown musical nightmare, there was no shortage of unique ways to make us think twice about what we're hearing.



📢 Raise Your Voice Thread: 10/29/2026

Our “Raise Your Voice Threads” are hosted most alternating Thursdays at 12PM ET to offer creators more avenues to uncover exceptional stories on Vocal. As we are continuously searching for fresh creators and inspiring stories, this thread provides an opportunity to exchange and discuss the stories that have moved and motivated us on Vocal.



October Challenge Winners

October  turned out to be a much stranger place than we expected, and we loved seeing where everyone took it. From familiar autumn scenes to some wonderfully unexpected settings, this challenge brought out a lot of creativity and imagination.



Vocal Bonus Leaderboard: 10/28/2026

You Are Here Challenge Winners

For  You Are Here , we asked writers to put readers somewhere they weren't supposed to be. What really stood out in the stories that placed was how often that line wasn't so clear. Sometimes you knew you were pushing your luck, sometimes you had every right to be there, and sometimes you didn't get much of a choice. Writing in second person made those situations feel a lot harder to watch from the sidelines.



Daybreak 

Selfish somnolence regardless cats crowd my face, my hair, fresh baked bread.   Today’s plans, not much, baring skin in the sunshine heartbeat in bird song,   austinite, suns voice swimming deep into a moon quenching from the heat.   A thin scent of pollen, something much bigger than hope sways clear ethos.   Most don’t see the stars. Boreas  takes, wants it all beyond suns setting.   Stars are everywhere and all the ways to see them mapping the ways to   immortal horses— meadows swayed with bells and chimes, longstanding zephyrs   looking westerly, moist pollen breezes stagger undressing young love.   Gripping all the birds mistral sky’s, its persuasive ways hang on loosely.   When I die I will come back as unspoken wind, acquiescence murmur,   a trojan filled horse. Mayflies have twenty-four hours to love in silence.   Lose I held a rose, thorny an ant on its stem, ill-omened stirring   I’m tired of words, the way they look back at me. Shooting stars, fire back   angry, helpless, scared— hating the way I see war, hopeful I write poems.   Black rain in Iran, the presence of history tangible by touch,   sure, she said, it rains like it would be always rain or was it close too.   Within a flower preparing to love our ghosts pollen dust and bee’s,   in shallows, tadpoles everyone’s thoughts of lotus dragonflies dip, weave    a single cut flower warmed with its own breath hangs free, ghost feet within reach.   Shy smiles redden blushing on the edges of a flowering pith.   Hair brushes my skin. Warmth of her lit eyes open a moths wings flutter,   meringue on my tongue, cool sun is lemon yellow today was the day   condensation forms. Skin of a fresh red apple I’m just not the one,   close but don't close doors, could not have been much more vague. A figure traced in rain,   wind with windmills chime. Grass and barley both agree, drama queen the sky.   When storm clouds appear, the leading edge of lightning petrichor, a horse.   What rushes in time unconditionally falls, yellow maple leaves.   With a little seiche in it, a body of water, a sandy floor between two rocks   catching the oceans empty ash.   In this  space  a salty breeze rubs my face, stars disenchant— my eyes open to mornings street din.   I have seen that moon before,   a sliver in the dark morning sky— a tinge of amber misty cloud cover, this time the horizon is not yours,   this time silence did its work, for the lotus of happiness is short lived,   acceptable behavior roots in the ash, raising a surface into a shape of beginnings, a fetus—sometimes I feel foolish I did not have enough time to think about it —missing the conversation, I tried to write words  into  body— I tried to write love poems, I really did but they are not that interesting, love does not work that way—for I love to hate; I love to eat, I love to walk on the beach —the  body  always wants to strike back.



Writers

Pareidolia

Why sometimes I believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.

The world as it had been shown to him was a piece of unreason, an idiot's dream.



Chosen Fractures

My bones could not withstand the fractures of the lines and creases from stomach to spine as you folded me in half and stuffed me in your pocket. I bled through your denim and stained like a period, blotched from a time worth having.  Sometimes I forget, pain can be transferred  to enemies or lovers really, any soul who may take up the space we wedge out for them.  But you, my dear, cause thicker folds. you are streams of light from a nuclear meltdown, the split of radiation that cracks the skull, you are bones sharpened to a point at my flesh.  And you shoot you shot, taut and aimed toward a life together, despite the pain, worth having.  Ah lover, I am turning cold, but I am pressed and held molded to your every form. I am a precious fossil etched in the sincerity of suffering and the proof of love.  I call to you with a final breath, don't forget me. Come back anytime, because you were a pain worth having.



Poets

We're All Drunk Here

This is in response to A. Bell's unofficial challenge, Tell Me About You. You can read about that here:

Tell me what you love to write, what scares you about sharing it, or what you’re hoping to accomplish here. More importantly,  tell me which of your stories you wish more people had read.



Politigram Survivor

The modern Far-Right believes itself the heir of “European culture” and the last in a long lineage of torch-bearers, upholding civilisation through virtue, wisdom and strength against a tide of “degenerate third-worlders”. In fact, the version of “European culture” they claim is a bastardised, homogenisation of ancient Greek, Roman, Celtic, Germanic and Near East cultures retconned into a cohesive identity despite the historical differences between these groups, and fuelled by the colonial “othering” of non-European races.



We Brought Ourselves


It was what I had supposed to be a gift from the hurricane: that I should still have a grandmother alive who remembered what happened then.



Humans

Maybelline's Hidden Habit...

The following microfiction piece that I wrote entitled "Maybelline's Hidden Habit" was inspired by the uber-fantabulous acrylic painting above titled  Captivated  by a young, talented artist named Mr. Dontanarious Kelly that I recently stumbled across while surfing the net.



Who Called Uncle Ruckus?

Kate

“Uncle Ruckus! What are you doing here?”

Is she really asking that right now? Donna knows full well she called that man out of his bed to come down here for some mess. Yes, mess!



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