Nestled into the rolling hills of the New York countryside lived a father, Stefano, a mother, Scarlet, and their daughter, Arietta. They lived a hushed life of breeding and raising cattle. They were not very wealthy, but Scarlet loved her daughter and wanted something that Arietta and herself could cherish deeply. So, she purchased a beautiful bottle of perfume. Scarlet explained to Arietta that it smelled of the fifth rarest flower in the world, Chocolate Cosmos. Arietta loved the perfume. Their life was wonderful. That is until Scarlet became ill and passed away peacefully in her sleep. They buried her under a bed of white roses. Arietta saved the perfume.

     Stefano soon moved Arietta and himself into New York city and found work at the Los Fortes Hotel. It was a magnificent hotel, six stories high, right next to an opera house. Ten-year-old Arietta was too young to work, and Stefano did not have enough money to send her to school. So every morning when Stefano came to work he sent Arietta up to the unfinished sixth floor where no guests went to find anything productive to pass the time.

     Arietta walked down the bone chilling, deserted halls to the deepest parts of the sixth floor. She went to the very last door on the left; the door was cracked open. Arietta gradually creaked open the door to see a dusty room that had paper everywhere and an open window. The window overlooked the swarming city below and she had an ideal view of the hotel garden beneath her. Just below her window was a square of piercing white roses that made her think of her mother.
   
   Every afternoon the clock tower would strike to announce it was 12 o’ clock. At this time, many aristocrats would file into the opera house to see the day’s performance. The woeful voices of the opera would get to the young girl. She could not escape the vision of her beloved mother, pale and lifeless, lying rigid in the coffin. Holding her misery in, it all became too much. So day in and day out, she would cut a white dove from the many papers in the room and write her sorrows onto the dove. Arietta poured her soul into every word she wrote. Her deepest emotions were scrawled onto the paper. When she did this, she was leaving a piece of herself on the paper. She was unknowingly giving the white doves a piece of her being. She did this until there was no more of herself to give, and she was just a hollow shell of a human, but writing on the doves were the only way she could rid herself of the pain she felt. At dinner time, when Stefano could be with his daughter, he began to notice Arietta was becoming very distant. At the rarest times, she spoke to him; her voice was an indistinct whisper.

    It was the first day of fall when Stefano led his daughter up the hotel steps; just like any other day. Arietta disappeared to the sixth floor and Stefano went to his station behind the front desk. Arietta arrived at her room and tripping over her treasured perfume bottle. She had just broken the only thing she had left of her mother. Fumbling to see through tear-filled eyes, the broken girl plastered the doves to the wall. She placed them so that the white side of the paper was facing up and the words were hidden underneath. A gust of wind tore her focus from the doves and onto the open window. She considered it curiously. She dipped her hands in the remnants of the perfume and coated herself. She turned again and walked to the window.

  Stefano just was on his lunch break and walked around the hotel to where the flower gardens were. He was going to pluck a white rose to give to Arietta, but when the gardens came into view he was met with a horrible sight. His sweet, beloved Arietta was perched dangerously on the window sill.

    “ARIETTA!” He screamed in absolute horror. Her attention snapped to her caring, beloved father just as her foot left the window sill.

    “Daddy.” She whispered as the wind carried it off into silence. She knew if she took one more step she could be with her mother, so down she went. All you could hear was a ”thump” as her body met the ground. The girl landed in the crib of white roses. She was quite broken on the inside but now she was broken on the outside, too.

  Her father stood there for a second. Then, people started scattering out of the building to see what the shrieking was all about. People began whispering in shock. Stefano ran to his baby girl. He fell to his knees, sobbing so hard he couldn’t breath. He held his daughter as he watched the blood drain from her face, making her pale skin become colorless.

    Whereas most souls high-tail it up to the heavens when their body ruins, Arietta’s could not because Arietta’s soul was not inside of her. Her very being was written into the doves in the space of the sixth story bedroom, and Arietta was restless to fly into the heavens. Alas, Arietta was stuck to the wall and even if she did manage to get off the wall, the window was closed. To make the matter worse, Arietta found that she was only fully aware and in consciousness at the hour of her death; which was at exactly 9:00 A.M.

 Ten years later, Stefano perished to grief. The city around the hotel burgeoned. The hotel itself became a watering hole for all the wealthy. The hotel flourished and they had so many guests that they had to renovate the sixth floor. Arietta’s room became Suite 407.

   There were two builders responsible for knocking down the walls and putting on a new wallpaper for Suite 407. Arietta’s room became the master bedroom, but the builders, for some odd reason,  could not bring themselves to take down the beautiful “wallpaper”. They would raise their tools to the wall to tear down the doves, but they were wracked with a raw wave of a mysterious guilt. So the doves stayed intact on the bedroom walls.

In no time, an Italian woman by the name of Madame Marzia, booked Suite 407 for a week. Madame Marzia was a young and exotic woman who had superstitions about everything. She would never deny someone a reading of their tarot cards or a look into her crystal ball. On special occasions, she would even talk to the spirits of the dead. She had come to America fleeing a lawyer by the name of Alfonzo Adassi; who had it out for her ever since she gave him a very dark and scary tarot card reading.

  The Madame woke up early the next morning. She was eating an orange when 9:00 A.M. rolled around. Madame Marzia smelled the familiar scent of the Chocolate Cosmos flower that she grew back in Italy. Why would she smell that here? She felt a sudden change in the atmosphere and she knew at once there was a spirit present. She tried to talk to the spirit, but Arietta could not talk back, she was only paper. Marzia looked around the room determinedly for the source of the supernatural energy, but at 10:00 the energy vanished. This happened for the next two days as well. Madame Marzia saw the pattern of the ninth hour and the smell of the perfume, but could not find the source of the spirit; until the fourth morning. After 10 years of straining against the wall, a single dove managed to pry its left wing off. Marzia saw this and understood. She tried ripping off the doves with her nails, but the doves were attached much too securely. Marzia raced into the kitchens below and grabbed a butter knife. It was already 9:52. With extreme haste, the Madame scrounged the doves off the wall with the knife. She could barely breathe. The scent of the flower was so overpowering; as if it were was sprayed on every dove. One by one, the doves fell from the wall and flew frantically to the closed window. It was 9:59 when she scraped the last dove down. The doves were pounding the window. Madame Marzia shoved herself into the mass of the doves, screaming, and pulled open the window.   

   Arietta pumped her many wings as hard and as rapid as she could; heaven-bound, but the clock struck, recognizing the 10:00 hour. A cloud of doves fell from the sky as Arietta lost consciousness. A chilly breeze blew the flimsy paper into the nearby wet concrete of a new sidewalk where they sunk in deeply never to soar again.

   Meanwhile, the hotel manager walked into Suite 407 to investigate the bizarre noises and screaming. He walked in to see gouges in the wall, Madame Marzia curled up on the floor, crying, butter knife in hand, and her skin covered in bleeding paper cuts. The hotel manager was appalled by what he saw and he had the case investigated. Madame Marzia explained that she was releasing a spirit. She was sent to court for the damaged hotel property. The court’s new judge from Italy,  Judge Alfonso Adassi, had no problem sentencing her to a psychiatric hospital for the rest of her life.