In a surreal dreamlike encounter, Lisa Simpson meets Cyrus's mother, Roya Shams, in a stark white room. Lisa introduces herself as Cyrus's friend and asks how Roya is, surprised that Roya cannot watch over Cyrus from the afterlife. The setting morphs around them into a great hall with a lavish feast, with chairs appearing as they sit before a fire.

Roya rejects the cliche of dead loved ones smiling down from clouds. She invokes the butterfly effect, arguing that people imbue past and future actions with grand significance while ignoring the weight of present choices, paralyzing themselves. Grass grows over the abandoned feast as the room transforms into Lisa's bedroom during a storm.

Roya philosophizes that minds are clocks, not crowns, and that stories are 'the excrement of time,' a line Lisa attributes to Adélia Prado. Lisa shares a memory of flying under anesthesia at the dentist; she realizes belatedly the insensitivity given Roya's death by plane. Roya says she felt no fear either, going from flying to dust in an instant.

Their conversation softens as Roya recounts her childhood dream of being an 'oceanographer florist,' arranging coral bouquets, inspired by an uncle who sold flowers in Tehran. Lisa informs her that coral is dying. Roya asks how one moves through beauty without destroying it, but Lisa rebukes her for trying to flatten everything into symbols, naming concrete causes of coral's destruction. As the bedroom floods, Lisa picks up a saxophone and plays a wordless song about the mercy of animals.