The Gutter Queen

She's a bunch of tattered rags, shreds of cloth rustling menacingly with a life of their own if you step too close, greasy strips trapping a vile musty odor that's nearly a weapon. She's old; that much is apparent from the shock of coarse white hair, the curved, stooped posture that is less osteoporosis and more the result of a woman so ancient she's shrunk and caved into a shell of herself twice over. Something rattles in her throat when she breathes, and every now and again she coughs, a bone-shaking, lung-dislocating cough that sounds like terrible infections and slimy diseases and rotting death.

She holds court in a corner of Main Street between two colossal pillars which ornament as much as hold up the sides of a magnificent, phallic (and magnificently phallic) skyscraper, those gargantuan, polished, twin bones mocking her hunched but tough frame. She makes no attempt to stand out of the flow of human traffic like the other bums, this queen of the gutter; she holds her ground and the moving wave of people bends around her, as if to her will. This is familiar to her.

The peculiar thing about her is that instead of facing her people she faces the building; on a ledge running the length of the building she has propped up a piece of glass. Its edges are broken, and sharp, the surface is spotted with age and filmed with unspeakable grime, but she watches it intently and unceasingly. Anyone glancing at it, distantly curious, can only see feverishly bright eyes shot through with red veins, the only visible feature of her face, but through it she steadily watches her disloyal subjects, looking, searching.

Fake eyelashes, fake lips, fake breasts kisses her sugar daddy in a suit - "Have a good day baby, I'm gonna go shopping today". Too much time working at the weights, not enough time working on his social graces belches, scratches his balls, leers at her. Egyptian-looking by virtue of too much eye makeup, liar by nature hurries along clutching the lottery numbers that will save her from the drudgery of fortune telling. Green mohawk, eternally displeased mouth watches them with an eloquent scowl that highlights the multiple piercings in his lip, more metal than man.

Soundlessly, hopelessly, the grimy old lips move, fetid breath issuing from between in a sibilant hiss, and she asks the mirror now the same question she has asked it for centuries:

Mirror mirror on the wall, who is the fairest of them all?

The mirror remains dumb.