The March sky was glitterless, not a single mark upon it. A pale shade of blue boundless and unscarred as far as she could see. Not a cloud, not a single rattle of thunder, not even the sunlight was too scathing to cause her to squint and stain this vast sheet of azul. 

Margaret was paused in her pathway to her car, the crumbling apartment complex behind her a moldy cavern for which she used only to sleep in and to think in. The vast sky above her was one she had not seen in ages. The clear unmarked blue had become so rare these days. 

She withheld her breath, birthing it into the clear air with aesthetic thought, like the breath of her lungs could only be harmonized with the air of God above, somewhere in the vast blue like a sea above her, spotless, pure, diamond, crystalline.

 Margaret smiled, thinking of the time as a girl her father took her to the beach on Long Island. How the sky was blue and the seagulls had scoffed at her, demanding taxation for use of their sands. How her father had squeezed her hands and walked valiantly through the flock of seagulls’ indignant hunger, marching a path forward towards infinity; towards the vast blue ocean. She had seen, finally passing those white feathers, her first true eternity as the vast blue of the ocean kissed the vast blue of the sky like lovers becoming one mingled element, pouring into and out of each other.

The sky here, in the baking parking lot at eighty-two degrees fahrenheit in this early Spring month, was the purest thing she could remember since that day at the beach. As she looked at the immeasurable vastness echoing out above her, she saw one dot. One period in the endless, howling poetry of the world. A gliding thing, a natural thing, a captain of eternity that ate in her wonder and spat out her scorn, swallowed limitlessness and defecated boundary and futility.

A vulture, more of a dot in the vastness than a bird, glided with unmoving effort, swirling in one corner of infinity, in the deep blue of the horizon. A stray hair on the smooth skin of blue above her yet a harsh metallic anchor to her hopeful memories of yesteryear. A crashing, flying blow which centered her back into her pessimistic surreality through which she stared at the world―through which all people now stared at the world. Hopelessness was genetic, now born into all people on the once endless continent. The dream of green futures had plummeted into a pile of inefficacious rotten fruit. People now cowarded into their corners of apathy, dog paddling through the waters of life as salt slowly glugged into their lungs.

Margaret stared at the bird above her with pitiless scorn, the filthy rat of the heavens, chewing away the molding hope once cast in steel in this country, now oozing with undefined indifference. A malice of embarrassment, a loathsome grind of teeth. 

She shook the hatred away and puttered towards her car pulling open the car door and starting the ignition. She raised the volume of the public station and listened to her favorite broadcaster and his liquid, dark voice. The news was bleak, but that baritone filled Margaret with some slight jittery feeling that grazed near hope but wasn’t quite there. It was again possibly a pull to a past experience, when car rides and radio hosts meant gleeful Springs and Summers, as opposed to the death echoes of all seasons of this gaunt continuance many used to call life in the modern world.

“A new report from the World Health Organization states that the few glaciers left of Greenland are melting at a rate to where they will not exist in the next ten years. The report points to numerous industrial farming and oil refinery companies throughout the world, as well as America’s continued use of gasoline.”

Margaret lowered her car window as she came to a red light and lit a cigarette as the announcer went on.

“In an update for our story which first began back in January, renowned Mongolian survival expert, Narantsetseg Khulan, supposedly spotted the Belled Wanderer, the figure clothed in the costume of the Swiss Silvesterklausen. She stated that she can corroborate the footprints at a size fourteen as she spotted them in the mountains of eastern Austria.”

The radio voice then cut to a female voice speaking with a strong Mongolian accent in English, supposedly Khulan’s voice “It is not like anything I have seen. I have tracked every predator in the Eurasian continent, every place where snow still falls, and I can’t quite explain it. The footprints seeme to grow a centimeter every twenty miles or so. I will continue to track the Belled Wanderer.” 

The deep, smooth voice cut back in, “The Belled Wanderer was first spotted on New Year’s Day in the Swiss Alps back in January and has had a handful of sightings ever since by hikers and cyclists and what not. Evangelical groups in the southern United States are claiming that it is a sign from God, where others are pointing this out as some social media hoax, possibly to interfere with elections in numerous autocratic governments in Europe and the Americas.”

Margaret rolled her eyes at the story. There was truly nothing sacred anymore. She looked up at the blue sky as she drove on, and in almost every corner, she spotted yet another soaring vulture, the condor of ruin, floating in the breezeless blue sky.