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Vaughn Amadio

Author on Reedsy Prompts since May, 2025

Stories (3)

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3 Stories

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Bring Him Home

Submitted to Contest #302

It was a searing hundred degrees outside the day I turned eighteen, the morning I peeled out of the trailer park before the cops could kick in the door. The '94 Tempo had no AC and a radio that switched stations any time I hit a pothole deeper than a golf ball—I was headed west on the tail end of a two-day speed binge and a swell of adrenaline. Everything I owned was in the passenger seat: her daddy's Mossberg and an army green JanSport stuffed with a pair of jeans and a few t-shirts, a wad of someone else's cash, her picture tucked in my wa...

8 likes

Company

Submitted to Contest #301

Spiders. Everywhere, spiders. They dropped from strings in the kitchen. They congregated in corners. Webs woven in cooperation to span the length of my bedroom ceiling. Nests in the dark recesses of my closet. It didn't matter where they'd come from. They were here now.My sister had told me to burn the house down."It's what any sane person would do," Frances had said. She'd laughed about it at the time. I had, too. To say the thought hadn't occurred to me would be a lie.Instead, I'd weather-stripped the perimeter of the house. Sealed off the...

12 likes

Nothing But the Sea

Submitted to Contest #300

At three in the morning, Mary's Ark unmoored herself from the New River and drifted eastward on the outgoing tide through the Port Everglades channel. From there, she slipped quietly into the Atlantic. Nobody noticed. Clay Strauss awoke hungover in the cabin six hours later. Sunlight filtered through the shades of the sole porthole to paint yellow stripes across the floorboards. The familiar scent of damp oak filled his lungs. Rolling waves, muted by the thick wooden hull of the houseboat, had rocked him out of slumber. Waves. For a few seco...

18 likes