Citadelle was a sort of urban goddess for rural populations: the big city, with rapidly accessible and more diversified services than in remote villages between countryside and hills...
Citadelle was luxury, it was the shining jewels well displayed in the windows, the party atmosphere of the Toy Day, the children's cries in front of mega ice creams and the lively comings and goings of secretaries and traders every day.
But Citadelle also hid unspeakable ugliness, which from the golden heart of the city crept towards the suburbs, the peripheries.
There lived those who had stopped looking for a place in society, the derelicts, the last of people.
There were narrow and dark alleys at the ends of Citadelle, which swarmed with black mice and tin cans full of garbage.
There were a lot of ugly faces, people looking at strangers with a mixture of hunger and hostile distrust. They were really bad places.
Diamond Sun thought so too.
She was a young fox with bright golden fur and two thin black eyes, who had met all kinds of defeats in life.
Every day she combed her bangs in different ways, every day she changed her earrings, every day she put on glittery eyeshadows in aggressive colors, which seemed to scream more pain than sensuality.
She wore high-heeled shoes every day, although she hardly ever left the house.
Every day she wore provocative dresses, light and shiny as fine silk.
And every day, new footsteps entered her decadent apartment, with the gray walls slightly peeling and the paintings barely covering the black stains of mold.
This was Redd's world, everything he had known since he was born eight years before.
He had a small room all for himself, gray and sad like the rest of the house, and a few wooden cubes to play with. It was already a good thing that his mother remembered to send him to take the school bus near their house.
Strangely, that life didn't weigh on the child, at least not apparently: the ugly thugs who entered his house at any time of the day represented a breath of fresh air for him, as he enjoyed… stealing from them.
Whenever he heard them lock themselves in the bathroom to take a shower, Redd would force the battered lock of the door with his mother's hairpin and sneak inside trying not to be seen, and with skill he slipped packets of cigarettes or money from the pants of those unfortunate ones. Redd was only eight years old, but he had already understood how the world was, and he didn't mind robbing people for whom he had no esteem.
He put the packets of cigarettes in his crumpled yellow backpack, under his diary and books, well hidden by the linen handkerchief and the skimpy snack his mother gave him.
Redd didn't take the school bus to go home, but went to the courtyards of the middle and high schools not far from his institute, ready to resell the stolen cigarettes to the older students, for at least five hundred bells a pack.
The teenagers were initially surprised to see that fox squirt wandering around alone at the exit of their schools, careful not to get caught by janitors and teachers, and at first they made fun of him. Redd remembered well the first day of his "sales":
"Hey, do you want to smoke?" he had exclaimed, stopping a trio of fourteen-year-old bullies.
"What does this brat want?" the kappa had asked, continuing to chew his gum noisily.
"Hit the road, kid, mommie is calling you!" sneered the head of the gang, a grim-looking bear.
"My mother is busy now." Redd answered, suddenly plunging into a seriousness that impressed the three older boys.
At that moment, Redd opened his backpack and took out three packs of brand new cigarettes.
"Where did you get these cigs, cousin?" asked the third of the bullies, a dromedary with a dejected look.
Redd smiled and assumed the most innocent look in the world:
"I stole them from some assholes."
The group backed away.
"Err, guys, where does this kid come from?" the dromedary asked his friends in a low voice.
"I don't know, he was born yesterday and is already walking around with some chimneys..." grumbled the bear, who couldn't help but feel a rancorous admiration for the insolent brat.
"So? What are we doing?" asked the kappa.
"Do you buy my cigarettes or not? They make five hundred bells per package." Redd urged them, always with an angelic smile on his face.
"Yes yes, we take them, fuck it." snarled the leader of the bullies, who had a real smoking habit and had already failed his class twice.
Redd began to laugh, he found swear words said by older ones hilarious.
"Bye cousins!" he greeted them, mimicking the dromedary's way of speaking.
He had earned 1500 bells and at that thought he began to jump happily, backpack on his shoulder, like any other child of his age.
It was already half past one when Redd returned home. The weather was good and spring had just begun, and the child didn't want to shut himself in his sad apartment. Among other things, he had already had lunch, with a tuna sandwich and a can of coke drawn from a vending machine.
Sighing, the child entered the house. Strangely, there were no strangers, only him and his mother.
Yeah, his mother... She was sitting in the dining room with her head between her paws.
"Hello mom!"
He got no answer.
"You're not OK?"
At that moment, the little fox saw it: a completely empty bottle of whiskey.
"I'm out of alcohol."
Diamond was not completely aware of being a mother, since with her lifestyle she was literally parasitizing Redd's childhood, who alternated playful moments with ones of almost cynical pragmatism.
"Should I go buy it myself?" he asked her, and his cheerful little voice took on a bitter, almost spiteful aftertaste, imperceptible for a broken woman like Diamond.
"Don't be silly, they don't sell alcohol to children." mumbled the woman, settling herself better on the table.
Redd left her to soak in her happy thoughts and shut himself in his bedroom, where he began to draw. He LOVED drawing, copying the shapes of leaves and flowers, or inventing fictional characters. Those brief moments of joy allowed him to escape from a reality that disgusted him, and in the silence of his sad room he could finally cry, one tear at a time, being careful not to wet the white sheet.
The 1075 bells that were left after his lunch remained in the backpack, he hadn't given them to his mother, because she threw the money away, she did nothing to get out of the dirt. Even he had understood this, a lonely and desperate second-grade child.
The turning point in Redd's life came on a tragic autumn afternoon.
As always, the boy had tried to steal the money from the wallets of the men who visited his house, but this time it had gone badly, very badly.
One of them had noticed it and had raised hell:
"You lousy brat, what did you think you were doing, huh?!"
A pandemonium had happened. Redd had slipped away from that mangy German Shepherd, and he had started screaming like a madman, grabbing random objects and throwing them all over the house. Diamond, alarmed by his screams, had gone to meet the shady individual and he had slapped her in the face.
"You trained your son well, congratulations!" he had told her, with ferocious irony.
The golden fox didn't understand.
"What do you mean?" she had asked him.
"DON'T PLAY DUMB WITH ME! THAT BRAT STOLE MY MONEY!" the man shouted even louder.
Diamond's black eyes widened, and she began calling Redd in a trembling voice.
The boy had glued himself to the phone and called the police. It was already on its way.
Needless to say, the German Shepherd completely lost his remaining composure at that scene: he violently pushed Diamond and she banged her head against the corridor wall. Little did he care, he just wanted to get out of there before the cops arrived.
Redd saw him run away like a brown and black shadow, and a shiver went down his spine.
It was over, maybe that horrible life was really over. He felt as if he had awakened after a long torpor.
When the policemen arrived on the scene, they found Redd motionless, kneeling next to his mother who was losing blood from her temples. He had wet her forehead with cold water, he didn't know how to do anything else.
"And now?" he had asked the policewoman that had kindly taken him by the paw; the girl had softened a lot in front of those bright onyx eyes, sweet and deep as a roll of licorice.
"Now we will take you to your neighbor, Mrs Emiliana. She will take care of you, and in the meantime we will take care of your mother."
"Will you buy her alcohol?" Redd asked, hoping to be told "no."
The young policewoman looked at him for a long time, wondering what kind of hardships such a small boy could have faced.
"No, honey, we'll buy her the good medicines that will make her feel better."
Unfortunately, those fairytale intentions quickly collided with reality: Diamond had been taken to Citadelle hospital, since the blow to her head had been serious even if not lethal. Once here, she had waited to feel a little better and ran away with the favor of darkness and a stolen gown during a shift change between fellow nurses.
No one had found her anymore. She had never returned to Citadelle's Dark Alley.
She hadn't returned to take her son back, the only good thing she had done in her life.
Disappeared, swallowed up by the earth, fled with someone or with only the ghosts of her past.
Redd, for his part, couldn't have lived forever with Emiliana, who was a kind-hearted tortoise but well advanced in age, unable to keep up with a young kid like the fox.
So... The doors of the orphanage opened for him.
Redd was the son of an unknown father and his mother had burned ties with her whole family, which was off the grid.
It was decided to remove him from Citadelle, to make him grow up in Sunbeam Orphanage, fifty kilometers from there.
Leafy was a pearl in the countryside, a green and uncontaminated place, it would have been ideal for a child as traumatized as the little fox.
So, accompanied by the same policewoman who had reassured him, the orange-haired boy greeted Citadelle and all the pain it had caused him, and with only a slight hesitation, he climbed the steps of the train.