Daisy couldn’t listen anymore. Even with her hands covering her ears, the depravity was inescapable.
Keep going.
She abandoned her hiding spot beneath the trees and ran to the next covering.
The music changed as a brass note punched through the air, startling her like a fist through glass. The strings faltered, stumbled, then surrendered to a new pace. Her steps did the same, as if somehow tied to the sound.
Chaotic bursts of instruments ruptured the beat. A trumpet’s lazy drawl. A bass line that swung. Softened only by a woman’s thick crooning. Her words were smoke and honey, eliciting amber visions around the botanical scent of gin.
Jazz. These fuckers are playing jazz.
The vintage tempo belonged in a speakeasy from the last century.
Like your clothes.
She looked down at her tattered dress, struck by how easily they convinced their targets to change.
It’s role play to them.
And every single one of them smiled as they complied. Bought for one evening. Transformed into treasures, objects to covet and own.
She looked back at the distant lodge, its blazing windows glowing like tiny golden eyes against the black backdrop of endless sky.
“Gatsby,” she whispered, seeing it now. The whole thing was a set. They were the actors. This was the plot.
A chaotic representation of mere mortals among giants. The powerless pitted against capitalists, in a sepia-toned nightmare that dripped with sins.
1922. Even their numbers seemed intentional.
The dissonance they created was deliberate. Rushed by luxury, to blur morality in the nick of time.
Everything here was intentionally designed to disorient them so they would fall faster into compliance. From the music to the decadent clothes to the abundance of food, every detail was devised to keep them off-balance in every possible way.
A tribute yelled—this one male. A stag.
A scuffle broke out on the lawn as the hunter, equal in size, tried to tumble the tribute to the ground.
“Fuck you, you fat fuck!” The tribute shouted, shoving the hunter back and racing away.
Daisy peeked through branches as the robust hunter labored after him. “Slow down, you bloody puff!”
She smirked as the tribute got away.
Slipping beneath an arch of wisteria, she cautiously traveled further from the fading house. Purple blooms brushed her shoulders like soft fingers, the smell so sweet it carried the dizzying warning of a narcotic.
To her left, a sharp cry cut off before it completed. Terror or pleasure? Daisy couldn’t tell anymore.
This place blurred the fine lines of propriety into a murky smear of taboo grey.
Another bell wailed. The single, resonant gong fell from high above and lingered like an echo in her mind. Who was overseeing all of this? Someone was keeping score.
She looked back at the shrinking lodge. The further she ran, the more it shrank into the earth. A dot in the distance until it was gone. She wandered on, disturbed by the unsettling quiet, accompanied only by the disjointed retro jazz.
She was lost.
“At a boy, Forester!”
Daisy drew back into the shadows as two men passed another hunter with a tribute thrown over his shoulders, her hands tied at her back.
