Latest Stories
Most recently published stories on Vocal.
The Fae King
It began with a girl. Black-haired and sweet and gone too soon. It is the way of mortals to die, of course. Most pass within a few decades, unless they can be tempted away to fairyland and persuaded to stay there. Even then, mortals live only as long as they can go without visits to friends or family that allow time and the weight of years to catch up to them.
By Natasja Roseabout 10 hours ago in Fiction
Mr Bear
The thing about fire is that it spreads so very quickly. One moment you’ve watched your mom light a candle on the windowsil, and you can smell the vanilla scent wafting through the air. You’re setting out the tea set for your dolls, the same way you do every day. Mr Bear sits front and centre, the most important guest of honour waiting for his drink.
By Maddy Haywoodabout 10 hours ago in Fiction
What is Managed WordPress Hosting and Why Does It Matter in 2026?. AI-Generated.
I spent the first year of running my WordPress website on the cheapest shared hosting plan I could find. It cost a few dollars a month and it worked well enough in the beginning. Then the traffic started growing. Pages that used to load in 2 seconds started taking 5 or 6. Security alerts started appearing. A plugin update broke something and I had no backup to restore from. I was spending more time firefighting technical problems than I was creating content or running the actual website.
By Edward D. Longfellowabout 10 hours ago in Futurism
The Tragic Tale of Jedfrey Mulligan. Content Warning.
Jedfrey Mulligan stood 6’8’’ in his stocking feet and weighed a good 280 pounds on a good day. Once he won a race at the county fair, running a quarter mile - it was a horse race. The county fair discontinued the eating contests, as did each of the towns all around, because he could outeat anyone within 250 miles. He could lay a man out flat with one swing from his mighty left fist and perform a hundred-fifty pull-ups with his right arm. He could lift a wagon and change the wheel and axle without aid, and once lifted his neighbor's ox and carried it home, over two miles away.
By Mother Combsabout 11 hours ago in Fiction
What is Angie and How Is It Changing WordPress Website Creation in 2026. AI-Generated.
Building a WordPress website has always required switching between multiple tools, dashboards, and interfaces to get things done. A designer works in Elementor to build pages, switches to the WordPress admin to manage plugins and updates, opens a separate code editor for custom snippets, and navigates a theme settings panel to adjust site-wide styles. Each task lives in a different place and requires a different kind of knowledge to execute. Elementor launched Angie in 2026 to change that entirely.
By Louis Specterabout 11 hours ago in FYI
Still Life
On an evening like any other, Edgar was ironing his clothes for the Big Day, when he had a troubling thought. Thoughts were not common for Edgar, let alone troubling ones. Usually, he bumped along from A to B to C in a lovely soup of apathy. The thought was this: What is the Big Day?
By Raistlin Allenabout 11 hours ago in Fiction
