Top Stories
New stories you’ll love, handpicked for you by our team and updated daily.
Scrooge has entered the building!
From the swirling depths of inner turmoil, I grace you with a moment of much-needed sarcasm... I was gifted/tempted with the task of sharing unbiased opinions for a torrent of uplifting pieces of written art that have found their way to my unapproving eyes.
By Lamar Wiggins2 months ago in Critique
Firebug: Chapter 8 - Ripples
Rain, gentle and soothing, pitter-pattered on the window beside Theo. The steady percussion roused him from slumber slowly, teasing him awake like an oyster being pried out of its shell. It was only then he realized that his bedroom didn't have a window before. And that the door was on the wrong side of the room. The bed itself was all wrong, too, made up in soft, dark blue sheets that certainly weren't his.
By Natalie Gray2 months ago in Chapters
Giving Thanks in 2025
My Thanksgiving began at 3:44 AM. Not because there were things to prepare for dinner, etc. but because one of my dogs needed desperately to go outside. I got out of our cozy, warm bed, slipped my jeans and shoes on and out we went into the 28-degree morning.
By Dana Crandell2 months ago in Humans
A Dystopia of Our Own Design
If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—for ever. –George Orwell, 1984 More and more often, I look around and find that the themes of my favorite dystopian novels have come to life: separatism/division, erasure, controlling the past to control the future, the rich stamping on the poor while the poor take it out on each other, using technology to control and monitor our lives, etc. It is everything that we have been warned against, especially in literature—time and time again.
By Stephanie Hoogstad2 months ago in Futurism
Hall of Memories. Content Warning.
On September 20th, 2019, I called an Uberxl. On previous days I had been secretly packing my belongings in garbage bags and putting them outside the side door. At around 4 A.M. the car showed up, and I loaded it with my belongings and headed to my new home. This was the day I escaped my old home and my parents. I was 35.
By Sid Aaron Hirji2 months ago in Fiction
Perfect. Runner-Up in Maps of the Self Challenge. Content Warning.
In a perfect world I would never have been born. My maternal grandmother would never have been raped by her ex-husband and thus wouldn’t have fallen pregnant with her eleventh child: My mother. The girl would have grown up having girl-friends and would have been looked after by her older brothers and sisters. They would have warned her about the red flags that her highschool sweetheart was waving on full display: how he would say that he’d pick her up for a date and instead would blow her off to go drinking with his friends; how he was possessive and jealous whenever she was out of the house or out of his sight; how he bragged that he dated the girl with the best ass on the track team.
By Elizabeth Kaye Daugherty2 months ago in Humans
Maps of the Self Challenge Winners
Happy Thanksgiving Eve. We’re especially grateful today for the ways you show up with honesty, creativity, and heart. We all carry maps. Of who we’ve been, what we’ve felt, and the paths we’ve taken to get here. In this Challenge, we asked you to chart something that can’t be folded up or pinned to a wall, to trace a shape made of memory, identity, or change.
By Vocal Curation Team2 months ago in Resources
it was morning; i was mourning
it was morning; i was mourning. my pager went off. i reached into my pocket to see who it was. my mother was paging me. that never happened. i was riding my bicycle up park avenue. middle of winter. it was a bright cold. sharp. almost painful. bitter wind blew through the broken zipper on my jacket. reminding me that i was broke; or broken?
By stone petoskey 2 months ago in Fiction
