Читать онлайн
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

ashesofthephoenixbook.wordpress.com

www.facebook.com/janefademerrick

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.