a few pretty girls

A few pretty girls passed him and laughed. He heard them whisper something but not what it was they whispered, then they stopped walking and laughed again and turned around to look at him. He could feel his moustache coated thickly in the yellow mayonnaise from a coronation chicken sandwich, could smell curry powder quite clearly, and he tried to suck the hairs into his mouth to clean them but given his ongoing mouthful only made the mess all the worse. The girls approached him and said “my god” loud enough to hear, but nothing to him as such, not directly. They stood several feet away from him and simply stared, and he felt his face aflame and wished himself anywhere. “Small hands,” one of the girls said, and she was right. His hands were incredibly small. Eventually he continued to eat his sandwich, which until then had been at his side and drooping slightly between his fingers under the weight of its own wet filling, ignoring the girls as best he might, as though they were trees or shrubs or some other part of the landscape. They watched him with absolute disdain and laughed occasionally before leaving. Although it was a delicious sandwich he nonetheless found it to be quite lacking in garnish or adornment; his fridge had been quite quite bare at the point of creation.