6th September, 1895 — Harvest Festival, Irvingly
Ester stumbled from the casino, coming out into the midday daylight bleary-eyed and shocked by the sudden, bustling sight. The square was usually much sleepier, she had supposed – although strictly speaking, it had been a good ten years since she had lived here.
Perhaps none of this was actually here at all, and the colourful sights and fairground rides swimming in her vision were just part of a laudanum-induced hallucatination. She hadn’t slept last night, either – she never could, if she didn’t get enough – so instead had apparently wasted the night and the best part of the morning away with certain rakish company at the casino, and eventually holed up in a back room emptying the last few drops of a laudanum bottle onto her tongue.
It had been just enough, because even amidst these hordes of people and colour and noise her heartbeat was determinedly slow. Ester drifted, not entirely conscious of herself, through the scene onto a bench, or something she supposed was a bench – in fact, it was one of the revolving chairs of the pleasure wheel, on the furthest outskirts of the square. She had sat beside a (confused) stranger, to boot – but before she had put these pieces together, the wheel had started turning again and their chair had been lifted slowly into the air.
Their half of the wheel was near the top of the contraption when Ester spotted something she was sure was an opium hallucination, a hazy mist slowly spreading out through the square below them, as if consuming all the stalls and people in its wake. “Do you see that, or is it just me?” she wondered aloud, languidly. An odd change in the weather, wasn’t it?
Perhaps none of this was actually here at all, and the colourful sights and fairground rides swimming in her vision were just part of a laudanum-induced hallucatination. She hadn’t slept last night, either – she never could, if she didn’t get enough – so instead had apparently wasted the night and the best part of the morning away with certain rakish company at the casino, and eventually holed up in a back room emptying the last few drops of a laudanum bottle onto her tongue.
It had been just enough, because even amidst these hordes of people and colour and noise her heartbeat was determinedly slow. Ester drifted, not entirely conscious of herself, through the scene onto a bench, or something she supposed was a bench – in fact, it was one of the revolving chairs of the pleasure wheel, on the furthest outskirts of the square. She had sat beside a (confused) stranger, to boot – but before she had put these pieces together, the wheel had started turning again and their chair had been lifted slowly into the air.
Their half of the wheel was near the top of the contraption when Ester spotted something she was sure was an opium hallucination, a hazy mist slowly spreading out through the square below them, as if consuming all the stalls and people in its wake. “Do you see that, or is it just me?” she wondered aloud, languidly. An odd change in the weather, wasn’t it?
~counts as a staff-led thread for the SWP~
![[Image: ester2.png]](https://file.garden/aNvJBm887DiA_9JU/ester2.png)