They live in mirrors. There's one now, look at him striding, his clean black suit and the pressed button shirt that hardly creases when he walks and the tie, that slim inky pencil tie that never moves with the wind. There's no wind in mirrors. That's my guess, anyway. I keep him picture-framed in this hand mirror as he crosses the street. Nobody sees him. Everyone sees me, though. Bright red hood over a yellow cap. Flower patterns on my poncho; pink/lime checkers make my track pants glare. The crowd walks round us both, but only I get stares. Yeah?
You got to dress angry if you want to scare them. They're not frightened of colour or nothing like that, if that's your line of thought. It's how it makes you seen.
My mirror's part of that, too, although I need it anyway. Folks pretend not to 'cause they're mostly polite, but they notice a girl using a mirror to see. Sometimes I look back at myself in this thing, I see the frown lines on my droopy, serious face and the kid's-playground colour explosion I'm wearing in a mirror framed with plastic flower petals, and I wonder what the hell I'm doing. Listen, I know it's weird. Not like the lady always going on about the teeth. I don't think she knows how nuts she sounds and that's what makes her crazy.
But you got to dress angry. Or if you don't, you got to take a page from the teeth lady and make yourself noticed in a crowd. Sometimes I see them walking astride someone or standing just over their shoulder, their ties dangling down like velvet straws. It's always the background-people. The folks that vanish in a crowd.
Say you've got one of those gaggles of suits, all power talk and smart phones, and sometimes there's that one guy that's just listening to the others, sorta hanging behind a little bit because maybe the ones at the front are too absorbed with themselves and didn't think to make room for him on the sidewalk. It's that guy. There's another suit in the gaggle, but it doesn't match and none of them see it, not even the background-guy.
If I try to get a look at its face, I'm always at the wrong angle. Or something's in the way, or my eyes mist up at just that moment. Don't know how that works. They live in mirrors, maybe they got some kind of defense mechanism against folks looking in. Think that's part of why they only stalk in crowds. Who brings mirrors to the street? Who gives a second thought to a suit in a puddle reflection, in a department store window? Maybe you would if someone weren't walking past his face with an umbrella at just that moment. Don't know what you'd see, then. My guess is something angry.
Tried setting up a trap once. Bunch of mirrors around an intersection so that through my mirror I could see most angles at once. Waited for one to wander through so I could see what they didn't want me to. None ever did.
I did see something, though. Well, maybe I did. I was heading over to adjust one of the mirrors when I crossed a point where two of them reflected each other. And I looked into it. I threw my angry colours into that corridor of reflections with everyone all noticing the shit out of me and I don't know, I don't know, man, but I thought I saw something. It was just in the shape of the mirror frame; in the way my hood repeated, in the headlights of a car at the traffic lights. The eyelids of a cafe's facade. The teeth of a fence. I leapt into an infinite reflecting ocean and the ocean saw me.
I still got a few years' worth of bad luck left over from that trap. At first I thought the pencil-ties kept away because they smelled something fishy, but these days I wonder if they don't see things in mirrors too.
Anyway, that's why the mirror. Could you spare a buck? I'm starved.
