Ashes Of The Phoenix. Jane Fade Merrick

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      Fade flipped through a few more pages, until the last subject, this time designed with a red pencil. It represented the profile of a naked girl kneeling on the ground. The line her body formed remembered the slow death of a swan as it collapses. Her hands were clasped, resting between her knees and the long hair hanging in front of her face showed only a glimpse of her eye, full of anger and despair as she stared toward those who were watching her. On her left leg, a long scar broke the delicacy of her features.

      She felt as if someone had just scraped her soul with a rusty spoon. She stared at the drawing, reading her thoughts for the first time. A knock on the door brought her back to reality.

      â€œFade 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.

      â€œYou’ve seen my sketchbook, right?” he said chokingly because of the thrust on the wall.

      â€œWhat 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.

      â€œNo, let me explain...” the boy hissed, his voice becoming more and more broken.

      â€œYou’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.

      â€œWhat 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.

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

      â€œI 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.

      â€œHere,” 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.”

      â€œHe 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...”

      â€œWhat kind of things?”

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

      â€œOuch...” said the boy imagining the pain that can be inferred by giving a kick with rollerblades.

      â€œBut 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.

      â€œI 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.”

      â€œHow did you save yourself?” Asked the boy quivering.

      â€œI 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.

      â€œBang,” 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.

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