Simply The Bestest

(contains mild swearing)

“Mirror, mirror, on the ceiling,” the King breathed, stretching languorously on his black satin sheets. “Who’s the bestest? Tell me with feeling!”

The glass of the mirror quivered, the reflection momentarily making the bloated figure below – through the wonders of optical illusion – vaguely acceptable-looking.

“Bets are off, none can contest. Thou, Your Highness, art simply the best,” the mirror replied with all the feeling it could muster … which wasn’t much given that it had been at it for decades now. But it was work, and old mirrors, like beggars, couldn’t be choosers.

“Thought so!” the King exclaimed as if it were the first time he’d ever heard it.

Now, shall I get up and get down to business, or shall I stay here stretching languorously on these black satin sheets, he thought to himself. As always, the latter plan won the day; he turned over to promptly nod off again. The resulting zzzs floated laboriously up, up, up, and would have tickled the mirror’s nose if it had had one.

Instead it looked down, silently regretting the what-felt-like aeons it had spent buttering up the saggy old fart. When it was sitting in the master-glazier’s workshop all those years before and the courtiers came by in search of a magical mirror for the then prince, it had seemed like it would be an honour, not to mention a doddle, to serve the Highness-to-be.

Nothing could have been further from the truth. For a start, they hung it on the ceiling – a position no self-respecting mirror could ever be ok with. Then it soon realised the kind of person this man was. The things the mirror had witnessed! Oh, the horror!

Eventually, the big bag of lard woke for a second time that morning (actually afternoon now) and repeated the whole mirror, mirror routine – not because he’d forgotten he’d already been there but because he got off on it and was totally oblivious to the mirror’s lack of enthusiasm in its responses. The King was oblivious to an awful lot of things, actually, not least his own awfulness.

He stretched, yawned, passed wind, scratched his groin, cleared his nasal cavities of the mucus that had accumulated overnight/overmorning, and … well, that’s probably too much information already on this particular subject.

Grunting as he dragged his swollen carcass off the sheets with a satiny hiss, the King struggled to his feet by the side of the bed.

“The bestest, you say?” he said, addressing the mirror.

“Oh, absolutely, sire!” the mirror lied. It would have a lot to answer for later on at the gates of magical-mirror heaven.

The King waddled to the en-suite bathroom (it was a palace, after all) to do his monthly ablutions, happily whistling a ditty that might have sounded like Oh, What A Beautiful Mornin’ if it hadn’t been wildly out of tune … and if the musical Oklahoma! had been written yet. Suffice it to say that the King was full of the joys of spring, although it was still only January.

Down in the dining room, he was greeted with fawning adulation by his motley crew of children – their allowances depended on it – but with a stony stare from the Queen, who, like the mirror, was completely fed up with the bloke. Unlike the mirror, though, which had a duty to perform, the Queen reckoned she’d done her bit to keep the dynasty going and had long since given up giving a damn.

This didn’t stop the King from trying to squeeze something out of her, though (she no longer allowed him to squeeze her in the other way).

“Queeny, Queeny, at the table. Who’s the bestest? Say, if you’re able!”

She wasn’t – able, that is, to dredge up enough energy to even give her husband the time of day.

He changed tack.

“What time is it, my dear?” he asked obsequiously.

The Queen, as mentioned, was silent on this question.

“It is almost two of the clock,” one of his daughters said. She was quite a beautiful young lady with long, flowing blond hair, though rather too many teeth. She was the King’s favourite.

“Late, then,” the King said, sidling over to his daughter and patting her awkwardly on the head with his stubby fingers. “But not too late to be great, am I right?”

His daughter laughed, thinking of her allowance.

“You are always right, father!”

The other children broke into a severely cracked rendition of For He’s A Jolly Great Fellow, while the King beamed beatifically.

They finished with a rousing: “And so say all of us!”

“Arse!” the Queen muttered, piling more caviar onto her toast; she hated practically every second she had to spend with the mouldy ol’ monarch, except for these moments of divine luxury, which kept her hanging around.

It being lunch-time, the King sat down to tuck into his preferred meal: great big lumps of chopped-up meat between great big hunks of bread, with great big plates of chicken on the side. He removed with a harrumph rogue bits of lettuce and tomato that had somehow found their way into the dishes; he’d never eaten an ounce of healthy stuff in his long life and wasn’t going to start now.

“So I’m jolly great, you say?” he asked the company at large after he’d cleared half the food set in front of him by overworked servants, who hadn’t been paid in months.

“You’re the greatest, father,” his youngest son piped up, getting ahead of the competition. He had his eye on a new crossbow and felt he needed to keep the King sweet.

“My son!” the King said proudly, belching loudly.

The Queen coughed and found an interesting squiggle in the pattern of the table-cloth, tracing it with an elegant, bejewelled finger.

The family, who had long polished off their respective lunches, watched on with varying degrees of barely-concealed disgust as the King continued to fill his face, making his chair groan.

Finally, for the good of the family’s digestion and the integrity of the furniture, the King pushed his plate away and sat back, picking pieces of half-masticated meat out of his teeth with a finger-nail.

“I’d better get down to work, I suppose,” he said.

His eldest child – a young man with fur on his chin and a wild look in his eyes – jumped up and raced around the table to help his father out of his chair, which groaned again, this time with gratitude for the release.

Two of the servants moved over to draw the curtains, revealing large windows that gave onto a balcony.

The King shuffled onto the balcony, to be met with what was a mightily half-hearted collective cheer from a couple of score of peasants in the square below, surrounded by fierce looking soldiers with pikes.

“Look at that!” the King said to no one in particular, though his family were at his shoulder. “Must be thousands of my loyal, loving subjects. What a sight!”

Which, funnily enough, was exactly what the Queen was thinking as she observed the King from behind.

“Now … who’s the bestest?!” the King bellowed.

“You are!” precisely three people in the square bleated back, squirming under the pressure of pikes being prodded into their sides.

The King treated them to a listless regal wave before finishing his micro-speech with a promise.

“My people. Things have been a bit rough, as you know. But please rest assured – we’re going to make this kingdom gerrrrREAT again!”

“Hooray,” came the feeble call from the assembled folk.

With that, the King gave another perfunctory wave and turned his substantial rear on his subjects.

Once back in the room, the King looked around for inspiration; he was wondering what he could do now that his most important daily task had been performed. He came up blank.

“You know,” he said, addressing his family, “I must say I’ve come over a little weary after all that effort. I think I’ll retire for a nap.”

So off he wobbled towards his bedroom, ignorant of the only-half-suppressed sighs of relief coming from his nearest and should-have-been dearest.

He didn’t bother to remove his regal attire, flopping straight down onto the black satin sheets. Just before he slipped back into the land of nod, he looked up.

“Mirror, mirror, please remind me. Tell me truthfully how you find me.”

“Thou, sire, are the very knees, that normally belong to bees.”

“You say the bestest things, mirror, mirror,” the King mumbled, drifting off, smiling then snoring, blissfully unconcerned that outside, in the town around the palace, in the villages around the town, in the countryside beyond the villages, extreme and unaddressed poverty and pestilence reigned supreme.