Oh sweet nothing...
She sat on the park bench, all her possessions in the whole world on her tired, battered frame and in the small sack that she sat by her side. She was an old woman, and she showed every sign of her age. Wispy grey hair, tangled and matted, tumbled across her face, as she peered myopically through eyes that must once have been beautiful. Now though her face was marred by a permanent squint as she tried to make out the world in front of her.

Harsh lines had been etched across her face, a testament to the times she had lived through, and generous lips were now cracked and sunken, and her entire mouth was drawn into a scowl. Absently she brushed the hair out of her face and sat there on the bench, stooped and sullen.

Her hands must have been young once too, though you would never believe this by looking at them. Now her hands looked like the gnarled branch of some hollowed tree, with lines running across their entire length. Her veins strung out like ropes, her fingers turned clawlike, around a small apple that she had scavenged for her lunch.

She ate noisily, with great relish, wasting none of the apple. She hadn't eaten in days. Discarding the gnawed core, she bent down with a sigh, and plucked a small blue flower, one last tribute to her missing youth. Everyday she would go to the government shelter to try and get some food, but it was no place to stay. Then she would walk around the city, looking to get some other food, or she would head straight to the park if she got enough at the shelter.

Everyday she would sit on this bench, and pluck a flower from the small bush that grew just to its side, and everyday she would put the flower in her hair. And then she would sit on the bench and watch the children playing, and she would love them, love them for being so innocent and free, and hate them, hate them for being young when she was not. And she would cry, and finally, at night, she would squeeze herself onto the bench and sleep.

It hadn't always been like this. She had been young once, and beautiful too. She had driven the men mad with lust, and the world had been a wonderful place, where everything was as she wanted it to be. And then she had married one of the men around her, and it had seemed a happy enough decision to start with.

But then he would start coming home drunk and beating her, until she knew she couldn't take it any longer, and she ran away from him.

She ran away from the town where she had lived, and came to the city, as everybody did, but she could not get a job. She had no skills and little education, and she was helpless. But then her beauty came to her rescue as she started working as a prostitute, and for some years at least, she was happy again.

She lived well but she didn't save her money, and as she grew older and her beauty left her she was left helpless again, and finally, all she had left of those days was the bench in the park, and the little blue flowers whose name she didn't know.