Ashes Of The Phoenix

“Fade it’s me! Open up, I forgot something!” Said Jag from the other side.

She was caught by a flash of anger and rushed like a fury to the door, opening it wide. He didn’t have time to say anything for she grabbed him by the collar, lifted him up and slammed him against the wall of the lobby.

“You’ve seen my sketchbook, right?” he said chokingly because of the thrust on the wall.

“What the fuck are you doing, spying on me? What do you want from me? Who are you?” She asked, keeping the handle of her knife, still stuck in the lining of the belt, and clenched in her other hand.

“No, let me explain...” the boy hissed, his voice becoming more and more broken.

“You’ll pay for this...” she stared at him blankly, while she grasped the knife that she was about to unleash.

His wheeze, caused by her fist on his larynx, sobered her up. She released her grip, leaving him to fall on the ground.

She returned to her apartment and came out shortly after, holding his sketchbook. Having secured the door with the lock, she approached the kid and threw the album at his feet. “I don’t want to see you ever again” were her last words before slipping down the hall and leave the building.

She wandered for a long time through the streets of the city without knowing where she was going, she wanted to run, but she no longer felt the burning desire to escape; she felt strange, as if something inside her had been eradicated. She understood that it was time to return to a place where she hadn’t been for a long time.

She entered a semi-hidden alley of the city when the sun was setting and stopped in a small open space which was the loading and unloading area of some warehouses abandoned years earlier. The dirt around her, the gloomy silence interrupted only by the traffic of the main road and the light that gave everything an orange-pink hue, made the place look almost surreal.

Fade thoughtfully stared at a particular point of that place for a few minutes.

“What is this place?” Asked a familiar voice from behind her. The girl gasped at the unexpected question, and turned around. Jag was sitting with his legs dangling on the small protruding sill of a bricked off window.

“How the hell do you manage to follow me around?” She asked, without any more resentment against him.

“I have magic powers” he joked with an open smile.

She replaced her usual sullen expression with a half-smile, “Yeah sure...” then she returned serious.

“Here,” she continued after a moment's hesitation “Is where it happened.”

She approached the point that she was staring at. “This is a place abandoned by everyone, where even criminals have to give up their business, because at night it turns into an arena for desperate people. The concrete of this road has absorbed the blood of many and, that night, there was me and the boy who challenged me.”

“He continued to irritate me,” she went on with effort “he was a brat but he had a sharp tongue, he said things that made me lose my mind...”

“What kind of things?”

“He insulted my parents, but he didn’t go on for long: I broke his nose with a kick...”

“Ouch...” said the boy imagining the pain that can be inferred by giving a kick with rollerblades.

“But it wasn’t enough for me, I wanted him dead. I pulled my knife and I attacked while he was lying on the ground whimpering for his broken nose. He started to beg me, telling me that he didn’t want to die, that I'd won and that he wanted to go home... I don’t know what came over me but suddenly the anger was gone. I didn’t feel sorry for him, I was just disgusted. When I stopped he took the opportunity to grab a knife, stick it in my leg, push me backwards and then jump on me in turn. I instinctively raised my arms and I stabbed him in the stomach.”

She hesitated a moment, as if afraid to tell the rest of the story.

“I still remember his expression, his eyes staring at me as they slowly closed, the words dying in his throat and the blood coming out of his mouth and dripping and staining me for what I had done... He died like that, when I no longer wanted to kill him.” She confessed softly. “I had to push him off of me and try to escape despite my leg sodden with blood and the pain that almost made me faint.”

“How did you save yourself?” Asked the boy quivering.

“I have a friend, or should I say a saviour,” she murmured to herself, “whom I met the first time I came to live here. He’s a Doctor and, although it may seem absurd, he took me under his wing without asking too many questions. That night I managed to reach his house and he gave me stitches. “Then” she concluded “there was a violent storm that wiped away the traces of blood and the police found that to be an excellent deterrent to continue the investigation: these roads have long been at the mercy of poor devils and the law doesn’t visit them willingly...” she implied.

Before Jag had a chance to ask any other questions, Fade declared: “Now let's go, this place won’t be very safe in a short while.”

The child nodded, he jumped down from his spot as improvised spectator and walked toward the alley from which she had come. She followed him sadly, touched her leg with her hand before she looked back at that place for the last time. She pointed an imaginary handgun formed by the index and the thumb of her hand.

“Bang,” she said quietly mimicking a shot toward something unknown and then left, as if she had closed the chapter of a book for which, for some time, she was searching for a convincing end.

The dark allure

The next morning Fade woke up again because of the noise that Jag was making in the kitchen. The microwave signalled the end of the heating cycle with a noisy sound.

The girl sat dazed on the mattress and looked at the opposite side of the room, a number of rags rolled into the shape of a mattress brought to mind the night before, when she had prepared a bed for her new and very weird acquaintance.

The boy presented a plate with a steaming waffle covered with a sticky sauce, which she eyed suspiciously, but she didn’t hesitate to eat it.

After an endless amount of time, which the girl needed to finish her hairdo, the two were on the street and began to quarrel about a question left open the day before: the brat insisted that it was impossible not to know the group of which he was a huge fan, because they were world-famous; the girl, for her part, retorted that she didn’t give a damn about a stupid band. The argument went on until they entered the place where they were directed, a music CD shop. He rushed inside leaving a puzzled redhead at the door: she didn’t even know why she was there, but the excitement that the little boy put into everything he did, somehow, managed to involve her. She slowly skated inside, finding herself surrounded by shelves full of CDs with many different graphics.

She observed the illustrations of a few covers for a while, and then she reached the child who was standing in a corner, wearing some headphones that were too big for his head. He seemed mesmerized by the music and he sang the song he was hearing, while holding a CD case. When she approached him, he took off his headphones and said, “Here! Listen to this!”

“Are you kidding? I’ll ruin my hairdo!”

“Then look!” He said, handing her the album that he was holding tight. Fade half-heartedly took the case and glanced at the cover. It was a picture of a group of four people in front a totally black background. “Dull” she thought, and began to consider the members of the group: two boys with a girl between them, modelling in a cool pose; behind them loomed a curly-haired boy of considerable height, his stature would probably have been overwhelming in person.

The two in the front stared at the camera with diametrically opposed expressions: the first, with an extremely ‘Emo’ hairstyle, had a thoughtful look that seemed to communicate what his whole life was a continuous torture; the other displayed a grin which seemed to tease you because he had achieved success and all you could do was envy him. The latter, especially, stood out for his dress code. A half unbuttoned dark shirt showed a jumble of ornaments around his neck. Finally there was the girl, smooth black hair, deep shiny eyes as dark as the night. She stood in the centre of the page with her arms crossed. Her eyes observed you from head to toe, as though you were a nullity and she dangled a cigarette from her mouth. The smoke, clearly added with a miserable editing intervention, rose up to form the band name. “Momuht” Fade read.

“They don’t look that special to me”, she said, handing the case back to the boy who greedily grabbed it, holding it tight, as to protect it. “You don’t understand...” he started walking towards the exit “They need me...” She pretended not to hear the last sentence and followed him to the counter.

“I’ll buy this” the boy exclaimed, standing on his toes, handing the album to the clerk, paying and leaving the store contemplating his new purchase.

Jag was walking on clouds, admiring the album from all angles; he immediately tore the cellophane and glanced at the inner cover to see if there were other images; a joyful laugh confirmed the positive outcome. When he opened the lyrics booklet, the child happily started commenting on all the photos within it, describing the person and what role he had in the band, bringing the booklet up to Fade's face, who uninterestedly glanced at it: she didn’t like those motions and fanatic poses, they were pretty annoying to her. She had never liked those who acted as ‘fucking egocentrics’, and that band seemed to be exactly such; she continued to skate slowly, thinking of other things. Once they arrived close to their ‘secret hiding place’ the girl suddenly stopped, then she caught the boy by the collar and pulled him back. “What’s the matter?” asked Jag, quite annoyed by the interruption of his daydream. She frowned and motioned for him to follow her to an alley, and then they started spying from around the corner. A police car and a fire truck were stationed in front of the building in which the girl lived; several policemen investigated by stopping passers-by. A fireman came out and spoke to an agent. “Yes, the house is inhabited: the electric cable that was reported to us was illegally redirected to this condemned building.” At those words, Fade felt the impulse to choke her improvised companion, but she controlled herself, “Do you see what you did?” she said, whispering, despite the desire to yell at him “I told you not to install those stupid electric appliances! Now they found me out!”

He didn’t answer but seemed visibly disturbed. After a moment of hesitation he suggested, “Then come away with me, I'll give you a new home in the place where I'm going.”

The girl looked at him, she wanted to ask him if by chance he was teasing her, but the boy's eyes already answered her question. She couldn’t stand him, she couldn’t believe she had to accept his offer; she remembered too well how hard it had been to find that room, how hard it was to find a place among thousands of homeless people and build a life from scratch. The thought of having to start all over again drove her crazy, having to look for all those items that were part of her daily life, to arrange her spaces, to gather her stocks, and then to find herself suddenly without all those things that represented her world. Her head was exploding when she was distracted by the noise of the fire fighters carrying out boxes in which they had packed all her stuff. She knew that by now whatever she had built for herself was gone. “Let's get out of here,” she said, turning on her skates and leaving that place where she would never return again.

The next few minutes they walked in total silence. Jag followed the girl with his head bent holding the cover of his new CD, but his mood was definitely different from when he had bought it. She broke the ice by asking:

“So where's this place you're headed? The one on the map, I guess...” The boy stopped suddenly “Yes. We can leave at once!” He exclaimed, heartened.

“What are you talking about?” But she couldn’t finish her sentence because a car with dark windows stopped beside them. The driver came out and spoke to the boy obsequiously, while he opened the door for them: “Have a seat, sir.”

Jag jumped in excitedly as if he had never experienced such a similar experience before, but the girl was reluctant to get into the car.

“Have a seat, miss” the driver said, bending lightly.

“Come on Fade, hop in!” The childish voice from inside the car prompted her “We have a plane to catch!”

“A plane? Are you crazy? I don’t even have any documents! How do you think...?”