A Bonded Pair

The two friends look up at the cold, blue sky marred by fractal branches of the surrounding birch trees. The tan bark is hanging and sloughing off the bone-white trunk like the rotting flesh of craveable carrion Illimani and Marijo have never seen or smelled but somehow know they would love to eat. Their beady eyes, peering out of a face that is bald out of necessity, narrow in on a flock of sparrows huddled around their almost empty dish of food. The Andean Condors at the National Aviary know the host of tiny brown birds would taste like a haunch of veal that’s been dead for 10 days. 

Yum. 

The scavengers can eat everything, regardless of rot or bacteria, because their bare coral countenances lack feathers to capture the rancid bits. They also have human staff that feed them at regular intervals every day. They are well fed and very stuck. 

For which sins are the condors confined in this outdoor prison? Endangered species should be protected. At least that’s what Ranger Rick used to tell me every month in grade school. On isolated islands, endangered species thrive due to lack of competition. After a lengthy illness while on what he thought was his deathbed, John Donne said that “No man is an island.” He imagined his illness was a payment of sorts for a sin he had committed but could not yet identify. Donne may not have been an island but the men and women who inhabited the first iteration of the Western Penitentiary where it stood in Allegheny City, must have certainly seen their sentences as if they were marooned on one. 

For 62 years, the panopticon prototype designed by William Strickland in 1818 sat in the exact spot that the National Aviary currently occupies. Can the condors sense the misery left behind? Can they taste the desperation of the people sentenced to solitary confinement in a labor camp of circus tent proportions? Sicknesses ran rampant across the prison grounds due to unsanitary conditions and a lack of exercise but isn’t it a sedentary lifestyle that renders veal so appetizing? 

A low growling hum emanates from the ground. Don’t worry. It’s probably just a train coming out of the tunnel on the other side of Lake Elizabeth. Still, the condors’ breathing quickens in anticipation. Arterial spray decorates the interior of a nearby port-a-potty occupied by an addict and wings flap in instinctual excitement. Across W. North Avenue on the 3rd floor of Allegheny General Hospital, a 47-year-old mother of three succumbs to injuries she received when a drunk driver used a Kia Sorrento to launch her body to the other side of Forbes Avenue. Red eyes narrow in on her exact location. 

It has to be that their senses are preternaturally magnetized to the endpoint of life. Or, maybe there was something else that existed here even before the octagon prison. There must be something that causes the unease you feel when you walk along the latticed walkways in Allegheny Commons. An eldritch terror that swims the dank dark fourth river and speaks to the captured condors and prisoners as they find no salvation in the dreams of the damned. Nightmares. 

I quicken my pace and think that it’s not just bad now, it’s always been this way. Somehow, that makes me feel better.