Vesta

There is something in Extra Virgo — and in Vesta more than any of the others — that seems made for resurrected aristocratic ladies, women from the 1980s who have crawled back from the grave still wearing their rotting Ferragamo scarf and their smeared violet lipstick. It’s an absolutely accurate perception: BeauFort has war, cordite, metallic salt. Extra Virgo, instead, has the revenant old ladies — the aristocratic zombies who smell of crooked violets, old skin, black rain, and wilted iris. Vesta doesn’t smell of flowers; it smells like flowers that have absorbed the entire melancholy of uphill streets walked by ghost-ladies with heavy bags and even heavier lives. It’s a slow, slack, almost exhausted scent, full of damp memory and frayed velvet — a wet poem dragging its feet under a streetlamp.