🎶15,000 REASONS— A New Wave of Musical Prose with Caribbean Soul 🎤📖 🎸

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🎸 15,000 REASONS — A Short Story About Truth, Silence, and the Sound Between
“The sun doesn't rise in Kingston — it opens, like a wound.”

This is how it begins — not with hope, but with heat and heaviness. My short story "15,000 REASONS" is not just about music. It’s about what it costs to tell the truth in a world that prefers background noise over real voices.

Set in a sleepy coastal villa in Kingston, the story follows Stan, a musician who’s done playing the game. When his rebellious song — "Crowd of Todor Zhivkovs" — unexpectedly makes it to the finals of an underground music contest, the choice becomes clear:
Speak now, or stay silent forever.

🎤 Why I Wrote This
This story was born from the tension I see around us every day — between art and compromise, between speaking out and giving in, between staying angry and going numb. It's for the creators who feel disconnected, disillusioned, yet still driven to say something real.

It’s also a reflection on what it means to resist not with violence, but with music, words, and unapologetic presence. In the age of content overload, maybe the most radical act is to mean what you say.

15,000 REASONS

The sun doesn't rise in Kingston — it opens, like a wound.
First comes the light. Then the white. Then — the heat, creeping through the open shutters and settling on the tiles like a cat. The sea doesn’t call. It simply exists, since the beginning of the world. Vast and eternal, wrapping the land in its embrace — it knows everything and reveals nothing.
Stan had been awake for a while. He was watching a seagull circle above the roof of the neighboring house. He heard the waves splashing at the edge of the garden. There, behind the fence, the sea was trying to forget yesterday’s stories.
He sat on the veranda with a guitar in his lap. Changing a string. It was like a ritual — the old string snapped with a pop, the new one stretched carefully. The small rusty tuning peg squeaked slightly, and the sound rising from the instrument’s body was still undefined, like something that hadn’t decided yet whether it wanted to be protest or forgiveness.
When you live near the sea, you stop expecting. You just wait. For wind, a letter, a memory, an enemy, a woman, a thought.
And then, with a crash, the veranda door swung open.
“They liked it!” Stella shouted, as if announcing something that could change the weather.
Stan didn’t move. He looked at her over his glasses, then continued winding.
“It made it to the finals! The song!” she repeated, now closer.
“What song?” he asked calmly, but there was something sharp in his voice — like a needle’s tip just beneath the skin.
“The one we submitted to the contest! ‘The End.’ Remember?”
“‘Crowd of Todor Zhivkovs’? That song?”
“Yes!”
“Impossible.”
“Look!”
She handed him the phone. The ContraKult website glowed in the morning shade. Black letters on white. Song titles. Links. Hyperlinks. Likes. Comments. Numbers.
“Well, we’re not number first…”
“No, no — look! This isn’t the final ranking. These are the songs with the most votes on the contest site and selected by the jury. But everything will be decided in the final, in two weeks — live. See here: ‘…the winner will be chosen during the live performances of the selected songs…’”
“I’m not going back to Bulgaria for some contest,” Stan said, putting the guitar beside the chair. Then he picked up his coffee. Cold. As it should be.
“But this isn’t some contest,” Stella replied, still standing, phone in hand. “It’s a stage. A platform. They’re listening to you. A lot of people.”
“So what if they’re listening?” Stan said without looking at her. “They listen, nod, like, then go back to their cozy apathy. It’s a crowd. Not a people. Not an audience — spectators. And music, to them, is just background noise to keep things from going completely silent.”
“And if you don’t go, you’ll just be one more voice that stays quiet. What does that change?”
Stan laughed. Dryly. Without malice. Like someone who’s seen it all and is tired of giving warnings.
“I’m not Christ, Stella. Not Che Guevara either. I have no mission. I’m sick of missions. People don’t want to be awakened. They want to sleep peacefully. Like well-fed pigs before Christmas.”
“Not everyone’s like that. How many thousands voted for your song? Fifteen thousand. People put it in the finals.”
“Yeah, and? Tomorrow they’ll vote for some vlogger selling fake bracelets for energy karma. And they’ll still be happy. Because it’s easy.”
“So what then? Don’t tell the truth? Stay silent, hide in a villa in Kingston, and change strings for the rest of your life?”
He looked at her. His eyes were tired. But behind them, something still alive. Something resisting everything — even its own nihilism.
“You know what a contest in Bulgaria is?” he said slowly. “It’s a parade of compromise. Of people ready to sacrifice their voice for a minute of airtime. Or the opposite — they sacrifice airtime to sound ‘authentic,’ while never having risked a damn thing.”
“And haven’t you been there? In that same parade?”
“I have. That’s why I left.”
Silence. The sea whispered softly. The wind passed through the palm leaves by the door, like a thought through a weary mind — without leaving a trace.
“If everyone leaves, who stays?” Stella whispered.
“Those who know how not to irritate the system stay. The ‘professional truths’ stay. The faces of consensus stay. And the songs that start with ‘I love you, mom’ and end with ‘anything is possible if you’re positive enough.’”
She sat down. Placed the phone between them. The song still glowed on the screen.
“And us? What are we?”
“We’re… the remainder. Of a breed that’s no longer trendy. Angry, aging, unfit for morning talk shows.”
“But we’re needed,” she whispered. “Someone has to speak the truth. Not because people will hear it — but because otherwise it disappears. Dies. And then it’s gone. Everywhere is silence.”
Stan was quiet. He picked up the guitar again. Plucked a string. It sounded clean. Clear. Like something unafraid.
“‘Crowd of Todor Zhivkovs’…” he repeated. “That’s what I called them, right?”
“Yes. And it was true.”
“Maybe it still is.”
“Right now, it doesn’t matter what they are. It matters what you’ll say. Right now. When you’ve written it. When you’ve sung it. When they can still hear you.”
“And if they don’t want to?”
“That’s not up to you.”
He leaned back. His eyes looked upward. At the sky. Where no one can like your thoughts.
“Alright,” he said quietly. “I’ll go.”
“Really?”
“But I won’t smile for the cameras. I won’t talk about how I was inspired by my childhood in Haskovo or how I believe in the youth.”
“I know.”
“I’ll tell them… everything. No makeup. No metaphors.”
“Tell them. If they boo you, at least you’ll know you woke them up. And if they go silent — then you scared them.”
“Sometimes I don’t know which is better.”
“It doesn’t matter. The truth isn’t meant to be comfortable. It’s like the sea — it just is.”
He nodded. And looked out toward the sea.
It was pressed under a leaden sky.
A storm was beginning.

HERE `S THE SONG USED IN THE STORY:
https://shemzee.bandcamp.com/track/--744

TO BE CONTINUED

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