vignettes

[marycatelli]

This week's prompt is:
jagged 🪚

Anyone can join, with a 50-word creative fiction vignette in the comments. Your vignette does not have to include the prompt term. Any (G or PG) definition of the word can be used.

Comments

[starshipcat.livejournal.com]

Shards of glass lay scattered across the blood-spattered floor, a brutal reminder of the previous day's violence. This sort of thing was supposed to happen in Those Countries Over There, not the US.

Even now the whole incident still had a certain unreality about it, for all that Senator Caroline Rostov had been right there. She'd only seen part of it before three of Spartan's Own had pushed her to the ground and covered her with their own bodies.

After my Secret Service detail revealed that they'd sold their souls for a mess of pottage.

Yet again she blessed Governor Thorne's insistence that she supplement the Federal protection for a Vice-Presidential candidate with these rough men whose emblem could be mistaken for that of a Midwestern collegiate football team. The landlord wouldn't be happy about the damage, and the insurance company might try to weasel out of covering it, but it was all things. She'd been reassured that the only fatalities had been among the attackers, and the members of her campaign staff who'd been injured would all be making full recoveries.

Now there was nothing left to do but pick up the pieces and figure out her next steps in a world where all the certainties of American political life had just been upended. Even in the midst of the Civil War, elections had continued on schedule -- but now Flannigan had used the violence at the polls out East as an excuse to suspend elections indefinitely.

Until order is restored. Which could last as long as that man pleased.

[marycatelli]

Not good, then.

[marycatelli]

"We lost them," said Mistress Isabella. "They were not suited for some of the less even lands." She smiled a little.
"They were swearing the rocks were jagged," said one woodsman, and laughter resounded.
"That will not last long," said Hendrick. "The soldiers faced worst the night they almost caught the princess, and the duke is desperate enough to listen." He looked at his sleeves. "It was just as well that we headed for the forest that morning. And, we will have to do something to prevent his success."
"The king is coming," said Mistress Isabella.
"The duke knows that."

[marycatelli]

"There's a storm out there," the newcomer said, his voice raised the moment he was inside. Another traipsed in behind him, also taking off his cloak black with water. "Did you want the king's messengers thrown onto the jagged rocks? Did you not know that's an insult to the king?"