vignettes

[marycatelli]

This week's prompt is:
amusement 🤹‍♂️

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]

Now that Lisa was back in Spartan's good graces, she was coming to enjoy things up here at Sparta Point. Not just Spartan's top-notch wine cellar, which Lisa had recognized and appreciated the first time she was here, but his consummate skill as a storyteller.

Some nights he'd tell stories of the war in Afghanistan, which included some pretty hairy close calls. Tonight he had people back from a narrow escape down by Phoenix, Arizona, so he was telling the lighter ones. The occasional crazy situation with military or Party bureaucrats, reminders that the inherent contradictions of Communism had produced a laugh-a-minute absurdism that spawned an endless stream of jokes, but mostly variations on "a funny thing happened on the way to the flight line" that weren't all that difference from Grandpa Tarrant's stories of being a helicopter mechanic with the US Army.

Well, other than the fact that commissioned officers were doing a lot of the maintenance work that would be done by enlisted specialists over here. But that was unsurprising, given that even in the present-day Russian Imperial Army, most of the enlisted men were conscripts doing their time, and the average Ivan Ivanovich in the post-Soviet Russian Empire still didn't do the amount of backyard tinkering Joe Average American did.

[marycatelli]

Ah, military life

[marycatelli]

She screamed. It echoed from the stone, and died more swiftly than the sound of the slamming doors. She threw herself at the door behind her, hammering at it with her fists, screaming for help, for Olivia, for Heaven's aid until, exhausted, she slumped to its foot, her hands bloodied. She panted for breath. If some evil-minded wizard had played a prank on her for his amusement, certainly he had received a spectacle, she thought, drearily. She shifted a little, to sit with her back against the door, and heard a hesitant voice.
"Aurora? My sweet darling? My little princess?"

[marycatelli]

Said Victor, bitterly, "He treated us as toys for his amusement.
"That's not the important thing," said Leonid. "He is a bloody-handed murderer, that is what is important."
"If they get the idea that royal knights are playthings," said Victor, "it will embolden evildoers. Fear of us keeps the peace."