1.

My stylist’s voice is lost in the noise of helicopters on CNN. It’s impossible to tell if the helicopters are chasing the wildflowers or if it’s the other way around. Outside the spa and beyond the plaza, San Elida is being eaten alive by common poppy, purple coneflower, and New England aster. By heaving Black-eyed Susan’s, yarrow, and sunflowers in blistered acres. It’s okay, this is just the outer blaze, my stylist repeats what’s being said over and over by the CNN reporter. His assistant plods Sharpie felt right above my eyebrow. Thunder is popping from far away, but it’s probably not thunder. The stylist says he heard some high school kids germinated seeds to their ex-boyfriends’ jeans during the fifth worst wet season in human history. Then a grieving husband in the county over left invasive honeysuckle at his wife’s grave. Now there are multiple wildflowers all blooming toward each other. The CNN reporter says they’re closing in quicker with the high winds and rain. The CNN reporter pretends to cry. Here, have another mimosa, my stylist says. It’ll calm us right down. Oh heck, for you I’ll throw in permanent eyelashes. Forty percent off. How’s that sound? People with lashes this dense won’t ever have to settle. You’ll always be moving from one man to another. You like that?

2.

When I was young, I remember walking along a drained riverbed near my house in Connecticut, after an heiress’s trillionaire parents had it emptied so they could find their daughter’s body, but all they found were shopping carts and oars being gobbled up by muck. Tournament-grade fishing equipment. Drones with home movies trapped on the SD cards. There was this gun, but it was a musket, and I’d guess whoever slayed the heiress didn’t use a musket.

3.

I met my husband at a church book club where we read Choose Your Own Adventure novels. After the meetings, we would drink coffee milkshakes from Friendly’s in his car. Is warmth always damp? I’d ask him. You’re such a silly girl for having these thoughts, he’d answer, licking milkshake from the mouth. But that’s why I like you. You’re different. On my twenty-eighth birthday, my husband presented me with a GMC Acadia garnished by a giant bow. He videotaped me from behind the living room window as I climbed up inside it. Later I would stab the passenger seat leather with a steak knife, popping each stitch apart. I wanted to see the stuff they didn’t want to show you. All I found was foam not yet imprinted upon. Wires to deliver heat. Deeper I found a nest of sockets and rails, but no heiress. Before fucking to the footage of me receiving the GMC Acadia, my husband and I would coat ourselves in scented Dial without rinsing it off. We let ourselves wear its grease, to travel by wet trails upon the comforter in the flashing lamplight from our automatic clapper being activated by thigh-to-butt slapping, until with a great gasp and a clammy brace on my hips, the life was shooting up into me like a molten meteor. In the second shower, I thought about a riverbed lined in radiant swimsuits that settled for sludge instead of skin. I thought about reading a Choose Your Own Adventure novel straight through without any choosing.

4.

You’re going to tilt down and not smile for the before picture. Make yourself look like you’re the mass killer in a courtroom, and the family’s all watching you, the stylist says. My family or the victim’s family? I ask. Uh, either one, the stylist says. Make yourself look like you just found out your ferret was a snake after all. Act like this is permanent. According to the statistics reported on CNN, every year wildflowers are responsible for destroying over three percent of evidence related to unsolved homicides. The stylist pulls a 3-ring binder from a shelf and flips through other before-and-after pictures. A sea of rosacea, thin lips, hyaluronic acid miracles, nasolabial folds, and sagging necklines. His fingers leave jam from a breakfast pastry on the same corner of each page. CNN says the roots have been down there for hundreds of years. I heard witnesses are unable to describe exactly how beautiful pollen smoke makes a sunset. Did you want numbing gel? You’re going to feel comfortable only for a few minutes, my stylist says with his finger scooping out a fresh glob. My back is to his window now. To the haze of ragweed and honeybees and dander. To newly tropical swimming pools attached to the houses where parents create the teenagers who start the forest flowers that destroy the houses. I tell my stylist that you can be a body hidden beneath towering firs and be swallowed up by a wildflower that some people started because they missed their loved ones. Just like that, before anyone could ever find you. Or you can end up as a body walking around undiscovered in broad daylight while drinking a mimosa that tastes like it was made with Sunny Delight. We’re going to begin stimulating the collagen now, my stylist says.

And Bethany. You’ll be, you know.

Different, I say.