A. Vaughn

Joined July 2021

6 stories

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Writer and technical editor. She/her

Stories (6)

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How Many Choices does a Can of Chicken Noodle Soup Cost?
I stared at the blazon red of the Campbell’s label and tried to ignore the rumble in my stomach. If I bought the soup, it would have been worth the right to choose to linger a little longer and steal a few moments with my grandmother after my cousins left the potluck on Saturday. Sadly, inflation had made the act of grocery shopping a joke. Evan didn’t want to come with me, saying he spent too many Choices the night before with his work buddies.
By A. Vaughn3 years ago in Fiction
The Harvesters
When Jim Blake opened his eyes, he was once again lying on his back staring up at the familiar canopy of Chickamauga Creek – but the forest was not the same. Everything surrounding him was a stark, bright white, and purely motionless. He sat up and wondered at this alabaster Chickamauga Creek. Grass was the same shade of colorless ivory as the trees, and the leaves of the trees bore the same shade of nothing as the bark. The only color to be seen was the bright blue of the sky, which Jim had a hard time believing was really a sky at all. There was no sun, and the bright blue did not belong to the sky as he knew it. It belonged on petticoats worn by fine city women or painted toy trains, but not on a sunless sky that somehow illuminated the world.
By A. Vaughn4 years ago in Fiction
The Girl in the Alley
There was once a girl who lived in a wooden box in an alley. She kept her box neat and cozy, stuffing makeshift pillows made of scrap fabric in one corner, and small toys she would make out of bottles and sticks in the other. She was queen of her little alley, jumping out to scare her neighbors in good sport and playing with the dogs in the backyards.
By A. Vaughn4 years ago in Fiction
The Man Who Waited
Nellie knew her time was running out when she saw her dead husband's foggy silhouette standing in the corner of her bedroom. She certainly wasn't surprised, living to be 98 was not all it was cracked up to be, but she was comforted knowing that her soul mate was waiting for her. Nellie couldn't wait to see Ed again, to hold him, to chew him out for waiting to enter heaven until she was ready. He didn't have to wait, she knew she would have joined him eventually, but she was secretly glad he did.
By A. Vaughn4 years ago in Horror
The Harvesters. Top Story - September 2021.
Letifer the Harvester leaned against a tree on the edge of the clearing at what was going to be known as The Battle of Chickamauga and listened to the battle rage. He and his brother, Mortem, had been hard at work for eons, but the human mortals still haven't learned to coexist. Not that mortals in general thought much about the Harvesters or the Beyond anyway. Letifer marveled at how consequential the human mortals thought their lives were. He and his brother had been around since the universe began, and humans, who only lived for 50 years at a time, thought of nothing but conflict and progress, leaving Letifer and Mortem to harvest the souls that were ripe.
By A. Vaughn4 years ago in Fiction
Coke and Jesus
My mother had become many things before she became a person living with dementia. In the 80's she became a cheerleader at ISU after being a lifeguard at the community pool in high school. After graduating, she was a wife for a whole eight months until she became the community college's outreach program director – then she became a feminist and a hot divorcée. She soon became a wife again, who hosted a radio show on Fridays... until she became a bit-deflated-but-still-independent-and-hot divorcée after word of her reputation got around to her husband. But third time's the charm, and when she divorced the third time, she at least became an MBA graduate and a mother. Somewhere in the battlefield of the third marriage she decided that I was enough and remained a single mother.
By A. Vaughn5 years ago in Fiction