Ashes Of The Phoenix

Jane Fade Merrick

ASHES OF THE PHOENIX

The Fade

Title | Ashes of the Phoenix - The Fade

Author | Jane Fade Merrick

Translated by | Maria Calabretta

English revised by | Nanci Ferro

Publisher | Tektime

(cc By Nc Nd 3.0) Jane Fade Merrick 2017

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The illustration of Nef and Fade arguing is by Debora Ferretti - facebook.com/DebsIllustrazioni

The city traffic, although hectic, to her eyes was just a succession of blurry spots that moved counter-current in slow motion. Her figure, slender and elusive, was comparable to a twig in the wind that, swinging among a thousand others, ended up getting lost in the eyes of those who watched her. She skated quickly through the streets on her shabby rollerblades, in constant flight from reality, aligning her motions to an unceasing search for suspension.

Everyone knew her but no one knew who she was; she lived a hand-to-mouth existence, she had no family and who knows what had happened for her to end up being a victim of a metropolitan area that mercilessly swallows up the people who don’t follow its pace.

There was no way to approach her; she was too hard to follow. She left only a blurred trail when passing by. For that reason she was named 'The Fade'.

Fade in

Like every morning Fade was in a foul mood. While she skated through the streets of her neighbourhood, she tried to think solely about what she would eat for lunch and, above all, how to get her hands on it.

From the first day she had appeared on those streets, she presented herself as a shabby light-skinned girl with worn clothes - who looked as though she had never been kissed by the sun - with long red hair tied in a weird hairstyle.

As though she wanted to recreate a disturbing mythological monster, she regularly consumed cans of hair wax to create a long red arch extending forward from her forehead and two smaller arches protruding from her nape.

To almost everyone she looked really ridiculous with that strange and cumbersome 'thingamajig' on her head, but they also found it useful because it could be seen from a distance, giving them the possibility to switch direction in order to avoid meeting her.

Fade stopped at a small market store and gazed inside the front door. The place was not that great: it was small, dark and full of stuff piled on top of the other without any logical sense.

“It’s perfect,” she thought, and immediately disappeared inside.

“It's so tight that I can barely turn around” she thought while searching for a hidden corner in order to grab some cans of food. As soon as she found it, she began to view the goods with a vague air.

“Tuna fish in oil, green olives, shrimp, anchovies... It’s not exactly the best but I’ll settle for it...”.

Once she was sure that no suspicious floorwalker was around, she grabbed a can of tuna fish and hid it in a pocket of her ragged trousers, the huge black shirt she was wearing did the rest, falling flaringly on her legs to cover any suspicious bulge. Finally, as an experienced street performer, sliding backwards on her rollerblades, she randomly picked up another can and quickly put it in her other pocket, ending her sleek trick by skating up to the cash register, where she would pretended to complain that there was nothing to her liking in the shop.

The precision of her plan, however, was marred by a small detail, so small as not to be seen. Before she finished her turnaround, the girl bumped against something behind her, tumbling to the ground and dropping a bunch of cans and other goods on the floor. The disastrous tumble brought her face to face with the cause of her fall, a stunned child of about ten, who stared at her with wide-open eyes.

At first she felt the instinct to attack him, but once she took a good look at him, she retraced her steps: something about the child was disturbing and fascinating at the same time.

First of all he had pink hair - “Which is rather odd for a child,” she thought - cut in a straight bob and furthermore, he was also dressed in a rather bizarre way. He was wearing a sort of miniature lab coat which fell widely over a pair of baggy camouflage pants, and finally, on his head he wore a pair of round goggles with red lenses.

“Is he a cosplayer?” she wondered, trying to remember in which time of year the Comics Exhibition took place in the city and also trying to remember what day, month and year they were in.

The infinity of the moment was interrupted by the shouts of the salesman, for her shirt had risen above her pant pockets, and he clearly saw the can shaped bulges beneath the fabric of her pants, and realized they were stolen goods.

Fade clumsily stood up among the general confusion and the relentless gaze of the child, slipping between the scattered products, ran like hell and disappeared among the streets of the neighbourhood.

When she was sure she was out of danger, she stopped to catch her breath hitting her shoulder on the wall of an alley.

“Damned that stupid brat!”

She looked around again suspiciously and then moved quickly away, again aligning her movements to the orchestra of her thoughts.

The indelible signs of the past

Before returning to the shelter which she had chosen as her home, Fade always took two or three laps of the block to make sure that no one saw her sneak into her 'secret entrance', which she then made with astonishing speed.

The secret entrance was nothing more than a rickety door of a dilapidated abandoned building. Once inside, the girl went through a long dimly lit corridor which opened onto a foyer in which four doors appeared. The only door equipped with a big lock nestled crookedly on the handle, was the entrance of the one room apartment she used as her shelter.

Once inside, she made sure to properly close the door by moving a safety bolt. The room was lit only by the lights coming in from the street lamps, but she didn’t care much because she was used to moving around in the dark.

With a push of her skates she approached the area turned into a bedroom, with nothing but a mattress thrown on the ground covered with crumpled sheets, and collapsed exhaustedly onto the bed. For a few minutes she stared at the void in front of her, with the usual intent to think only of strictly necessary things, with the purpose of suppressing the swirl of voices that overlapped in the slums of her mind. She decided that it was time to eat.

She pulled the cans out of her pockets, stood up and walked over to what must have been a pretty kitchenette, set them on the shelf and opened a drawer in search of a can opener. Despite the poverty of the means at her disposal, she was accustomed to respect certain basic standards of behaviour. After placing on the counter a piece of cloth — stolen from some unknown store —, she put a plate and cutlery on it, then sat on a high stool and ate. She did it slowly, even though the meal was poor and unappetizing.

Usually she got her water by filling some bottles from a fountain a few steps away from home and drank from a glass made out of an empty jar of marmalade. When she finished her meal, she put the dirty dishes in a supermarket basket, along with an empty bottle and prepared to go down to the fountain to wash them and stock up on fresh water.

She was about to leave when she heard two knocks on the door. For a moment she froze; since she lived there no one had ever found her. Holding her breath she put the dishes down quietly and instinctively put her hand behind her back, grabbing the only companion that she allowed to be part of her life. Under her shirt, in a lining attached to a shoulder strap, she hid a sharp kitchen knife, a weapon she had decided to use for her defence.

Another couple of knocks echoed in the eerie silence of the room.

“Who is it?” She asked, trying to keep her voice as steady as she could.

“It’s me,” said a child’s voice beyond the door.

“'Me' is not an answer! Go away!”

“I brought you something to eat,” he insisted.

“No one asked you for it! Go away or...” Fade’s voice faded at the end of sentence.

“It’s late, it’s dark outside and I’m lost,” he whimpered.

“It’s your problem!” She replied lowering her weapon, already exhausted by that silly conversation.

For a long moment there was nothing but silence, which was interrupted by retreating footsteps.

The girl stood still, waiting, ready to pick up any noise that came from outside, and after several minutes she became convinced that the boy had left. She returned to the ritual he had interrupted and grabbed the basket with the dirty dishes, and then she slid the safety bolt, slowly opened the door and checked that there was no one in the foyer.

She glanced around and jumped when she saw the sudden flash of two reflecting circles in a corner of the foyer. For a second she thought it was a cat, but the two circles were too large to belong to a domestic feline. She took a better look and saw the boy she bumped into at the market, sitting in a corner with his head between his knees: the reflection came from the goggles he was wearing. Beside him he had two big overflowing shopping bags.

“You’re still here!” She snapped.

The child suddenly raised his head and she recoiled when she saw that his round black eyes also reflected, like those of a cat.

The two studied each other. His face looked like he had just woken up from a deep sleep. She looked at him with a mixture of distrust and fear, and her hand was ready to pull out the knife. “Just to frighten him,” she thought.

The boy stood up, rubbing his eye. “Hello” was the only word that came out of his mouth, and then he stood waiting for an answer.

“What are you still doing here?” She asked, after a careful scrutiny.

The brat then picked up the bags at his feet. “The food, remember? I brought you something to eat!”

“I’ve already eaten, now shove off! I’ll walk you out” she answered, regretting that last sentence as soon it came out.

“Never be too kind,” she chided herself making her way out of the hallway.

From the foyer to the front door, the girl could not help but think about that strange situation. Once they reached the main door she turned to the child and, with a nonchalant tone she asked: “How much stuff did you buy at that market?”

“The bare minimum for dinner! In this bag...” raising the heavy bag he held in his right hand, the boy explained “... there are all the foods at the base of the food pyramid, and in this other...” he made the same gesture with his left hand “...drinks and juices!”

“All that stuff would last me for weeks,” she snorted indignantly.

“I also got something for you, you can keep it!” The brat continued undeterred.

After that chatter the girl blurted out: “I don’t want anything from you! May I ask why you followed me here?”

“I’m lost,” he continued, looking at her with those bemused eyes that Fade couldn’t stand the sight of “...and when I met you I knew right away that we were alike.” He pointed his finger to her wacky hairdo. “That’s why I followed you.” He concluded.

She gave a sigh of resignation, unsure whether to kick him out or investigate further. Watching him better, that pink bob, those red goggles on his head and that lab coat aroused the desire to learn more about him rather than to get rid of him. “Show me what you’ve got there!” she concluded, trying not to look like a quitter and, gloomily, she returned to the door of her shelter.

“... and don’t touch anything” was the last in a series of recommendations she made to the kid before opening the door to her one room apartment. The boy walked quietly into the room, taking the shopping bags with him. He looked quietly around; his look didn’t reveal any of his impressions on the miserable furniture. He simply put his bags on the ground and waited silently for instructions. The girl came up skating on her rollerblades. “So, what do you have there?”

He sat on the ground between the two bags, and with an excitement he had never shown until then, he began to bring out the products and describe them in detail, setting them all around him:

“Chinese noodles, artichokes in oil, butter, cereal, milk, chocolate snacks, soda, peanuts, potato chips, hamburger buns, pear and apricot juices, hot dogs...”

The girl had already lost the sense of all that was happening and was no longer listening to the long list of products he had bought. She got a tremendous headache, too overwhelmed by that absurd situation and still trying to find out what was wrong with that weird kid.

“And here’s the best!” cried the boy, standing up and showing her a large bottle full of a dark liquid “Carbonated drink with caramel and food colouring!” Having said that he proceeded to open it, but as soon as he unscrewed the cap, the bottle, evidently shaken for all that time, began to pour out the contents, spraying all around the room.

Fade’s thoughts came to a halt. Wet from head to toe with that sticky liquid and seeing the motionless child who was still holding the despicable bottle in his hand without doing absolutely anything about it, she screamed with a shrill voice to stir him. He winced, as if he had awakened from a spell, but by then the bottle had lost all its contents.

The girl grabbed the kid by the collar, also drenched in the drink, and threw him out of the door, cursing the disaster he had caused. He remained motionless, still holding the empty bottle in his arms while he heard, from behind the door, the girl insulting him, the sound of furniture being dragged and things falling down.

Suddenly the door flew open. Fade angrily handed him a basket of empty bottles and ordered: “Go get some water from the fountain below! Immediately!!” The child didn’t answer, he grabbed the basket and with soggy shoes he started down the dark hallway.

Meanwhile the girl roughly rinsed her hair using the water of some bottles she stored in the bathroom. She hated washing her hair, first because she had to do it with cold water - frozen, in the winter - and secondly because she had to redo her elaborate hairstyle, which was quite challenging, especially while hosting a choir of damned souls inside the head.

A short time later she heard a shy knock at the door. With her hair wrapped in a towel she went to open it, however, first she made sure it was him. The child entered the room tiredly carrying the basket with the bottles full of water. She seized one giving him instructions: “First take that sponge and wash all the furniture that you have smeared with the damn drink, and when you’re finished take that rag and wash the floor. I’m going to the bathroom to get changed, and don’t try any tricks, if you run away I’ll catch you!”

Having said that, she closed the door behind her leaving the brat alone, who slowly set to work.

Sitting on a rickety cabinet, the girl slowly passed a wet sponge over her fair skin. The contact with the water made her shiver; it had been a long time since the day in which, for the last time, she had had the pleasure to wash with hot water, but she cheered herself up: at least now she knew and appreciated the value of things that she had taken for granted before she had lost them.

For the umpteenth time she went over in her mind the principles on which her existence was based: “I shall steal only the essential to survive, I’ll never despise or waste anything; I’ll reuse things as long as possible...”

Repeating those rules distracted her, allowing her to suffer less from the cold. She now passed the sponge over a long scar on her left leg. As if it was a kind of eerie path, Fade slowed her motions as she followed it; the girl followed the long trail passing over the cross marks of the stitches which had now healed, and in doing so she counted silently: “One, two, three, four, five, six, seven...”. Seven stitches were needed to heal the gash she had been inflicted. “Don’t harm other people’s lives” was the last point of her list, while the cold rivulets dripped from her legs to die in the shower tray.

Once she put the dirty clothes to soak in a bucket, Fade left the bathroom wearing tattered pyjamas and the rollerblades at her feet, to find that everything was clean. That unexpected order made her reflect on the fact that she hadn’t even allowed the child to dry up; she took a better look and noticed that his clothes didn’t look wet, or dirty.

“But how...?”

“It’s a synthetic cloth: it doesn’t get wet nor does it stain” he anticipated her.

She was puzzled, but realizing that it had been quite a while since she had stopped following fashion, she had no arguments to rebut.

“Where are your parents?” She asked finally.

“In a distant Country” said the boy vaguely. After a moment of silence, he resumed: “I need to go somewhere, can you help me do it?”

“As long as you get out of here,” she replied disdainfully.

“Alright, now let’s eat something.”

She didn’t like that tone at all, for she found it quite bossy and demanding, but she merely grabbed a couple of packages of food and sat on the bed, which, fortunately, was spared from the earlier flooding.

The child sat on the ground and opened a packet of paprika flavoured crisps.

“He has weird tastes” she thought.

After having eaten a couple of chips, he asked, “What’s your name?”

She hesitated a moment: she was no longer used to confiding in someone, more so with such an unsettling person.

“I no longer have a name in this city. People simply call me Fade.” She answered.

“Then you can call me Jag” said the child, in no way intrigued by the phrase he had just heard.

Another endless silence stretched between the two.

Following the hearty - and high in carbohydrates - meal, Fade stood up and walked to the door; she pulled back the bolt and, with an elegant and sarcastic wave of the hand, she invited him to leave. “You don’t mind sleeping in the lobby, do you? Surely there is no place for you in here!”

“I don’t mind” said the boy standing up and approaching her. “But first,” he paused for a moment, “May I use the bathroom to wash my hands?”

“I don’t mind” she said with a toneless voice “But don't use more than half a bottle of water!” she recommended.

A few minutes later Jag came back, and, without saying a word, he walked through the door and closed it behind him; the girl slid the lock in place and listened to the boy’s movements in the hall, and as soon as everything was silent, she went to lie down on the bed.

After a night of restless sleep, Fade got up at sunrise, quickly put her rollerblades on and went to check if the child was still there or if he had gone away. While she slid the security bolt open, she couldn’t fully understand which of the two possibilities she would have preferred.

She opened the door very carefully, looked around and saw the boy in a corner, curled up like a cat because it had been cold the previous night. She felt no pity at the sight: too many times she had slept in those conditions, and she had seen hundreds of people acting in the same manner. “Come on, get ready!” She ordered, waking him up.

The day didn’t start well for the girl: in her haste to escort Jag to wherever he wanted to go - and finally get rid of him - she didn’t have the time to style her hair in her usual hairdo, so she went around wearing a hat which was big enough to cover all her hair and a pair of sunglasses to avoid being recognized; a pretty futile attempt, for she continued to wear her threadbare purple and black rollerblades.

She absent-mindedly followed the brat who walked before her carrying a big map with both hands. The child kept on speaking to himself reading the names of the streets and raising his nose in the air, looking for a match with the plates attached to the walls of the streets.

This went on for a bit and, suddenly, Jag stopped with the open map still in his hands. So abruptly that she almost bumped into him.

“What's the matter? Are we there?” She asked.

He didn’t answer; he just stood still in the middle of the street. Then he finally admitted: “I'm lost...”

Fade, stunned at first, burst out in a fit of rage: “What do you mean you’re lost? We’ve been walking around the city for hours and you realize only now that... Give me that!” She ordered, snatching the map out of his hand to understand where they were. Following a moment of confusion, she understood: “You idiot! This is the map of another city! How will you be able to find your way around with this?!”

“How is that possible?” He asked with the blank stare of a person who doesn’t understand what is happening.

“You tell me! It’s also the map of the city of another State!”

“That's why you speak with that strange accent” he replied tersely, without giving the slightest importance to the huge mistake he had made.

At that further demonstration of total detachment from their problem, she crinkled the map with a single move of her hands and threw it on his chest. “I'm done with you! I'm leaving!” She finished, moving quickly back in the direction from which they had come.

“Wait!” He shouted before she was too far to hear him. She stopped, although she knew she was making a mistake, and stood still without looking back.

Encouraged, the child ran to catch up with her, with the crumpled map under his arm.

“You were kind to me,” he said “Let me repay you.”

He dropped the map on the ground and took out of his back pocket a ridiculous - in Fade’s opinion - portfolio with manga illustrations on it. To her great astonishment, it was full of large bills.

Jag took one and handed it to one. “Here, this is for you.”

“This is a joke, isn’t it?” It was all she managed to say, without the slightest hint of willing to take the note.

“Of course not!” He continued, “I think it’s the least I can do to thank you for what you did...”

Fade stared at the bill. Of course, that would have been enough to get her by for a while without worrying and risking her neck or prison in order to grab a meagre meal, but inside her something was stopping her: decisions she had taken, mental chains blocking her actions, oaths, prohibitions and obligations that bombed her brain every day reminding her why she was in that situation.

“Goodbye,” she said, walking away from that awkward position. This time the boy didn’t stop her, he just looked at her going away, while he soundlessly lowered the hand holding the bill. He stood there, with his usual neutral expression; then he snorted into an excessively disturbing smile. “Hm! She’s incorruptible.”

Fade ran through the streets in a sweat, as if trying to escape the storm of thoughts that echoed in her head. She ran to escape from it, because sliding on the asphalt allowed her to return in tune with her more neutral thoughts. But it didn’t work; she reached her home with difficulty and jumped on the bed holding her head, now hostage of a flood of screams, loud noises and rushes of images that crazily overlapped in a space too narrow to contain them. Crumpled like a tin can she let out an agonizing cry of pain, and then collapsed on the mattress of her miserable shelter.

The next morning she awoke completely groggy. She seemed to have slept for a long time without actually realizing how long; she laid a while on the mattress, then she tiredly turned her head towards the room.