Lida White; "The House of Dreams"

Writer Feature: Lida White / Prose / Class of 2023

By Madison Alexander, Sonja Cutts, and Ana Haapala

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NOVEMBER’S SONG For my dearest, my darling, “En noviembre, noviembre, The wolf and the marigold moon, A wreath of roses and mulberries burns, The well whispers sorrow. En noviembre, noviembre, How my heart longs for dreams.” [unsigned.]

THE HOUSE OF DREAMS By the time they reach the hospital, flowers had sprung from my bones. They seem to be more concerned about what I’m saying than the lilacs pushing out of my eyes. The nurses shush my shrieking, but not one of them listens and tears out the roses out of my fibula. It hurts, and it doesn't help when the doctor injects something in my arm that makes me go limp, but doesn’t stop the poppies bursting open at each of my fingertips, one by one to the beat of my heart. oOo They’re sending me to Santa Flores. How dare they? We have family there — the Lopez. My grandmother and my aunts, my cousins, all the faithful ones. My mother, in her faithlessness, left shortly after she turned eighteen, but everyone else is still there. I’ve meet them a couple of times, at funerals, at family gatherings, a couple of hours at a time. They look like me, share my eyes and nose and mouth. Their voices are similar to mine, just a little over alto and scratchy in the morning. But otherwise, I know nothing about them. They are more alien to me than the strangers on the street. You know that feeling, when someone taps you on the shoulder and you turn around to a giddy face you don’t recognize? How your mind stutters and trips before they remind you that you used to go to the same elementary school? Imagine you’re in a house full of these distant friends, whose names and identities escape you but yours is known to them. oOo I first see you on a night wild with storms, firelight in your eyes. oOo “If you guess my name, I’ll give you a kiss,” you say. “But what should I call you now?” “November.”

oOo

There are red strings, you say. Spools and yards of scarlet thread, looping around our hearts and binding us together. I asked you if you meant ‘us’ as in humanity or ‘us’ as in me and you, and you smiled, and the strings pulled— oOo I am awoken in the night by a low murmur of sound from outside the window. If it’s a voice, it’s too quiet to hear the words. If it’s a song, I can’t determine the melody. It winds around the creaking of the house and curls in my ear like a snake, a snake with beautiful poison on its tongue. oOo The House, an empty shell of a building, lies among the wildflowers like a dead crow. Long timbers lie exposed like bones, blackened with fire and age. I don’t know why I’m so afraid, as if I’m — as if I’m expecting a doctor to come out, the sort of doctor that features in children’s nightmares, faceless, voiceless, hands and clothes and intruments soaked with blood. Was this where you grew up? Was this your childhood? Where did you go afterwards — oh. oOo I spend the day with my aunts. We take a picnic basket and lemonade and hike out to a little lake in the woods. The water is clear and deep and blue, green where the light hit it, dapples shifting in the breeze. And afterwards, when we come back, my grandmother takes one look at me and kisses my cheeks, saying they are as rosy as apples. Then, after the sun went down, I climb down the window and meet you near the roses, and we talk about the moon and the rain and the meaninglessness of death, and when I come back, my head is filled with you, and when I look into the mirror my cheeks are as pale as milk and there are shadows under my eyes. oOo Today I went to the library, and now I know. November, I know. I know why you didn’t have a life outside the House. I know why there’s no grave. I know why you can’t leave this place. There’s fire in my throat. Was this how you felt when you died? Like your flesh is peeling off your bones and your blood is spilling hot over your skin? It’s going dark, November, but fire is supposed to be bright— My head hits the earth— oOo “Where are you?” oOo “This isn’t funny, November, please come back, please—” oOo I can’t go outside. They won’t let me. I have to stay in my bed. I can’t reach you. Even in my dreams. Instead... I dream about fire. Fire and night and great monsters with mountains for teeth and stars for eyes. They’re devouring the world, and nobody is doing anything about it. Last night... it wasn’t you, the one who talks, the one who laughs. It was the one that stands silently above me. I’m lying on an operating table, and you’re standing above me with a pair of scissors. You reach inside my heart, and you start cutting away at the red strings. And I’m screaming at you, November, I’m begging you to stop, but you just smile — Oh God, how could I have been so stupid? Your smile. You smile exactly like Sofia Morales. oOo I should have seen it sooner. You and abuela Sofia’s faces are both sharp, your hair is both wild — although hers is white and long, yours dark and short — your secretive smiles, as if you’re enjoying a joke made in the dark. “I had a sister,” Sofia says. “Her name was Rosa. Rosa Morales.” She points to a picture on the mantelpiece. It’s black and white, fuzzy and faded with age, but I can still make out the faces of two girls, no more than five. Indistinguishable, from their flower-print frocks to their unruly hair, but the sister on the left smiles wider, laughs harder, and seventy years can’t keep me from recognizing you, November. oOo They’re tearing the House down. I went down there, and it’s swarming with people like ants, and the flowers have been overturned into black dirt. I tried to stop them, November. I tried, but I couldn’t shout over the screaming of the machines. It sounded like blood-lust. I know this wasn’t a happy place for you, but it was yours, and you deserve one place for yourself, because they took the sun and the moon away from you but why are they taking this one last thing from you? oOo “I know your name,” I say. It’s been weeks since I last saw you. My face has sunk, my limbs have thinned, and yet you are the same. A cruel part of me wishes you to suffer the same pain I do, to punish you for your audacity to be beautiful. You are not real, November. You are too lovely to exist, yet you are solid enough to carve out pieces of my heart. You narrow your eyes. They’re twin dark mirrors, but they can’t disguise the fire that burns behind them. You never left the fire, and the fire never left you.

What is it like, to burn eternally? Is it Hell? What did you do to deserve it?

“Does that change the way you see me?” you say at last.

It shouldn’t, but it does. You had been November-who-flickers-in-the- wind, November whose home is moonlight and shadows. Now you are November-who-once-was-a-girl. You had been mortal, like me.

“You had a family,” I say, because I can’t think of anything else to say. It’s pathetic, really, and it doesn’t escape your notice.

“So do you,” you snort.

I twist my hands. (Pleading? Begging? Hopeful? Scared?)

“How are you back?”

The flames in your eyes dim to hearth-fires. “You know my name,” you say huskily. “You know more of me than anyone has in decades.”

“They’re tearing the House down.”

You raise your chin. “Good.”

“But...” I flounder, confused. “Didn’t you say it was your tether?”

“It was,” you say. “It knew me, I knew It. But now you know me, and I don’t need It anymore.”

“Everybody needs a home,” I argue.

“I am not everybody,” you snap. “I am the one that outlasted my body. I am more than flesh and bone, don’t you see? I am what you dream of, what your nightmares are—”

Your voice cracks. Your head hangs down on your chest like a puppet. I want to touch you but I’m afraid you’ll disappear.

When you finally look up, your eyes are soft.

“I believe there was a reward for guessing my name,” you say, and you step closer, into the circle of my arms, hands in my hair and lips on my lips.

You’re soft, November. Do you know that? Sweet and soft like flower petals after the rain, or snowfall on a quiet night. You’re soft, and you taste like roses.

oOo

“Are you all right, Mari?”

“Yes, abuela.”

“You look pale.”

“I’m fine.”

“Are you sure—”

“Yes!”

oOo

“What are you planning, November?”

You hover at the edge of the glade, arms crossed, eyes narrowed.

“I don’t intend to be a ghost forever,” you say. “I want to be real.”

“Isn’t this enough?” I ask, and step closer. “Isn’t this twilight better than darkness?”

I entwine our fingers, and your hands are warm in mine. The night air caresses my skin, and I should feel cold. But I don’t feel anything. All I feel is you, burning like the moon.

You lean forward, a challenge, and your nose stops centimeters from mine.

“I want to feel again,” you whisper. “I want to walk in the sun.”

“How?”

But you only look at me, a look as deep as the sea, and you wrap your arms around me.

“Soon,” you promise.

oOo

The underground cavern is dark and glittering, filled with the twirling shapes of dancers, muted conversation and firelight. White rock crystals cling to the dome of the ballroom and lilies carpet the floor. I look down to see myself in a gown of deep, dark red, stitched with pomegranates. I am dancing with someone, and my mouth tastes of bittersweet wine.

I look up and you are sitting in a throne carved from a living blackthorn tree, twisted horns pushing out of your tangled hair. You look at me and smile with jagged teeth. As I watch, red strings stretch between us like bloody spiderwebs. They strings begin to crawl towards you, dragging the red out of me and leaving me gray, and as I fall, hands reached out to catch me and lower me the the ground as my vision goes black. The last thing I see is your gown going violet like the veins on your wrists as the cavern breaks into moonlight.

Are you Persephone, yearning to escape the Underworld, or are you Hades, dragging me down to join you?

oOo

I look it up. The anniversary of the fire. It’s November 14 — is that why you call yourself the way you do? — and it’s barely a week away.

My grandmother is keeping me inside, letting me out only for short walks in the garden. I would have resented her, if that hadn’t been the extent of my constitution. I’m pale, now, paler than I was when I first came here, and I’m thin. I don’t sleep well, and when I do, I am robbed of my rest by nightmares.

One night I wake up gasping for breath after I am buried alive, and downstairs I hear one of my aunts on the phone with mother. My aunt sounds concerned, my mother livid. Before the call ends, I know that arrangements are being made and I’ll be sent home to a hospital.

One more week, I hear them say.

My date of leave will be the same day you burned.

The same day you intend to break out.

oOo

I open my eyes to a wasteland. Santa Flores is burning in violet fire while the ground bleeds. As the Lopez mansion crumbles, I turn to see you hover above the flames.

“Why are you doing this?” I scream. “Why are you hurting them?”

You sneer. “They hurt me. They made it their mission to unwind my

brain and find what makes me tick and I will not let them—”

The scene shift, and I gasp awake. You’re at my bedside, pacing in

agitated circles, violet flames dancing in your eyes.

“They cut me up!” you hiss. “My blood still runs in this place. The ground is soaked with it. I need more if I want to come back.”

I sit up. “More red strings?”

You twirl around, and I realize abruptly you hadn’t known I was awake.

“That’s what happens when you die, and that’s why you can’t leave,” I realize. “I’m tied to life, and you were cut off, but now you’re tied to me.”

“Oh, Marigold,” your legs give out and you sink onto your knees, burying your face into my bed. Your hand finds mine, and I squeeze it gratefully.

What are you?

oOo

The morning before I leave, the storm begins. The clouds are huge and violet in the ivory air. By noon, the sky is black. By evening, the phone lines have been struck with lightning.

I told you I’d meet you. I told you I’d be there. I lied.

I promised my aunt that I’d join them in a moment. And I broke that promise too, I couldn’t keep both so I keep neither, and does that make me a bad person, November? Does that make me worse than you?

I go to the Morales. They’re long gone to safety, fleeing danger like normal people, yet I myself cannot bear to tear myself aware from the storm, and I wonder if that means I am not a normal human being anymore. I don’t feel like one anymore. Normal people aren’t enamored in ghosts, normal people don’t wish to dream nightmares, normal people wouldn’t know that this storm is not just rain and lightning, but something a thousand times more sinister. Normal people are rabbits running from fire, but I am the moth. The fire draws me in.

The house is cold, darker on the inside than the outside. I run up the stairs blindly, following a tugging in my gut—a flash or red, thin and glowing and long—pulling me up, past where I’d ever gone, up the narrowing spiral and into the attic.

No one’s been here for years. It’s the only place that doesn’t look wrong empty.

I fall into a space between a dusty wooden shelf crammed with trinkets and a moth-eaten sofa. Stacks upon stacks of photo albums and family letters rise in unsteady pillars from floor to ceiling. We threw nothing of hers away, her bed, her books, her toys, even when it became clear that Rosa wouldn’t be coming back, Sophia said. The circular stain-glass window of glares in colorful lightning.

This place is full of your history, full of your childhood memories. This place is where you had left your identity when they took you away.

Would we had been friends? Had we lived in the same time, would have we become as intimate, or was it the extraordinary circumstances which dictated the sincerity of our connection?

I flinch as lightning spears the ground. I am insane not to flee the storm, but not nearly brave enough to face it.

And besides, you’re not the person to take out your anger in this way.... right?

oOo

November 13th, 1942

Dear Sophia,

Is your name still Sophia? Here, nobody ever asks my name, and therefore I am whatever I want to be. Yesterday I was Estrella, but two days before that I was Katarina, and before that, I was Isabella, and on with rows of pretty names lined up inside my head.

It’s been a while since They let me write to you. The last time, there were little blue flowers scattered in the ground, but now they are red-gold, furled lady’s skirts. For the life of me I cannot remember what they’re called. They smell like honey and pepper but tasted bitter, like ashes.

Lately, They’ve decided we need to tell them everything—what we do, what we say, what we think. I told them that I fall asleep to the sound of screaming of devils every night, which made them look scared and talk to each other. Then they bundled me off the Table and I don’t remember much more. Something about sound-proofing the walls.

I don’t get it. They asked me what I was thinking and I told them! Should I be like that girl with the rose-hair, who rambles on about beautiful angels and fairies? I hear her in the night, you know, I’m not deaf. No dreams of angels should make a person shiver quite as much as she did.

I dream, I dream, I dream. But the line between dreams and reality is shakier more than people want to admit, dear sister. They’re scared to expand their boundaries of reality beyond what they can see and hear and touch. They are missing out on so much.

If the world of our minds existed alongside the mountains and seas, if every thought were laid bare under the moon, the universe would be infinite.

I dream of leaving. The walls of the House are always as fragile as paper in my imaginings. I dream I breathe fire like a dragon and set the wall ablaze. I dream I die and am resurrected like a phoenix. I dream and it is glorious.

Your sister

oOo

You were the one to set the fire.

It’s no longer a question of wether, but of when you decide Santa Flores must follow suit. You have taken it upon yourself to be an agent of chaos, and I have to stop you. Whatever nightmare of vengeance you’re trapped in has to end.

Rain lashes against me as I burst from the door. The wind pulls me left, right, back, away from the House. Go back! it screams. Go back! Go back! Visions of home and family, surface with the promise of safety. My old life: the sun-soaked streets of the city, the familiar laughter of my classmates, the warmth of my mother’s embrace, lie behind me. Everything dear to me begs me to return.

I couldn’t stop if I wanted. I am far past the point of return.

The skeletal remains gleam violet in the darkness, and for a second, the air shudders. From one blink of an eye to the next, the entirety completion of the House stands before me, sketched in unearthly, shaky scribbles, like a child’s. A moment more, and its gone, but lightning strikes and static becomes reality once more.

The door, flickering in jagged pencil lines, is wide open. When my fingers brush against the frame, electricity skitters down my spine.

I pass through — the rain is stripped from my skin, the air grows cold, and reality falls away.

oOo

“Mamá, look! Sophia! The trees are bleeding...”

Noviembre, noviembre,

“This won’t hurt. Keep still. It’s all in your head.”

The wolf and the marigold moon,

“Let me go! Let me go! You’re hurting me!”

A wreath of roses and mulberries burns,

“I want to go home...”

The well whispers sorrow.

“Am I evil?”

Noviembre, noviembre,

“Does it matter?”

How my heart longs for dreams.

“My blood still runs in this place. The ground is soaked with it. I need more if I want to come back.”

oOo

I reach you. Beyond time and vengeance and nightmares, I reach you, and you are in the dark, November. You have collapsed around yourself. You are the eye of the storm, and you’re quiet, November, you say nothing...

But seconds pass, and then I hear it. A scream, low and quiet but violent and harsh as if muffled, and the jagged edges of the House spin further in. The island is shrinking, shredded by your storm. What happens once the last patch of ground dissolves?

You raise your head, unseeing eyes startled wide, your face twisted in shattered agony, and I realize you have no more control than I do — this is something beyond both of us.

But you are not beyond me. I know you November, I know that you are at once the smiling girl with roses in her hair and name as well as the vengeful demon wreathed in violet fire.

I try to speak, but my voice is ripped away by the wind, and so I begin to hum, unhearing, going by memory. Not a voice (too quiet) but a song, pain and love given shape by melody at last.

Noviembre, noviembre, I sing silently. The wolf and the marigold moon...

It should be impossible for the sound to carry, but, impossibly, the whirlwind drops by a fraction, the memory-knives slow from a blur to individual shards. Static momentarily gives way to color, the walls woven from thousands of red strings, cat’s-cradling across lightning- charged space.

I can hear the melody in my throat now, quivering with each of the strings, and then I hear it in my ears. The storm settles down to listen, brittle and sharp.

I swallow harshly. “A wreath of roses and marigolds burn,” and my voice breaks across the silence.

You’re looking at me now, full and focused, and I wonder how can I possibly fascinate you so.

“The well whispers sorrow...” I manage, before my throat closes up.

“I can’t control it,” you say huskily. Already the calm is is fading away, the wind starting to shriek again. “There’s nothing I can do!”

“Nonsense,” I snap. “You are in control of your life — you couldn’t stop them from taking you away and you couldn’t stop them hurting you, but you can stop this! You can break away!”

I grab your burning hand in both of mine, holding tight. “They’re dead, November. They’re gone and they can’t hurt you anymore.”

Your face crumples, and you pitch forward. I catch you in my arms, lower you to the ground. The wind has picked up again, but in no longer screams in your voice. It grows louder and louder. The House of Dreams shakes and moans, flickering from reality to madness until bones meld with thought.

You look around wildly. “Why isn’t it stopping?”

“I don’t know!” I shout above the gale, as the threads start to rip and tear, tossed into clumps and strands by the wind and whisked into scarlet streaks in the air. All around us, the walls are crumbling away.

I pull you up. “We’re getting out,” I decide. “We’re going to get out of here alive and you’ll be able to walk in the sun, November, I promise you.”

We tear through the collapsing mansion towards the front door, but when we get there, it’s gone, swallowed up by the chaos. We retreat towards the windows, but they’re all blocked off, as if the House is swallowing us up.

Then you cry out, “Look there! Una puerta!”

It’s the door to the garden-courtyard I saw in your memories, and it’s hanging wide open. No chaos swirls beyond the frame, nothing but emptiness.

There is nowhere else to go. You grip my hand, and your eyes are bright and wild and wonderful.

“Jump?” you ask.

“Together,” I say, and despite the world crashing down around us, I smile.

“On three?”

“On three.”

“One, two—”

There’s a sound like the last exhale of some dying monster, the House collapses—

“Three!”

We leap from safety into the unknown, from light into darkness, and as the doorway disappears into static, the warmth of your fingers intertwined with mine are the last thing I feel.

oOo

Morning comes. The freak storm leaves Santa Flores near-pristine, rain- soaked and wind-battered but whole, had it not been for the strange old mansion at the edge of the town. There, in the middle of a field lush with scarlet flowers, stand the scorched foundations among black dust. Nothing else remains. They say that at the peak of the incursion, the House was blasted away by lighting.

A ghost and a living girl are nowhere to be found.

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Lida White is a writer and a current junior at St. Mary’s Academy. In The House of

Dreams, she explores the idea that reality and dreaming are complementary, rather than exclusive, states of being. The piece was inspired by Sylvia Plath’s poetry and the abandoned, overgrown houses she sees during long walks in her neighborhood.