An Awful Foreboding

An Awful Foreboding (from the series: The Sky’s Opinion)

It has never been hard for me to understand the belief in omens. At times nature seems to offer you an opinion. It’s a conceit, I guess, to suggest that the sky would care communicate with us, even if it could. But sometimes it catches a mood.

This cloud formed over the mountains to the west of Las Vegas. I doubt if many people in Las Vegas noticed. Hell, I doubt if even one percent of them were even close to a window. They were all captured by slot machines and dice and cards. All intent and hell bent on losing money.

I’d never seen the Las Vegas mountains like this. They usually lie lazily beneath blue skies, bathed in scorching sunlight. I’d been 4 days in Vegas and I’d grown tired of its banal surreality. I looked out from my hotel room and saw the darkening clouds. It seemed like an awful foreboding, at the time.

But they never hung around - the wind blew them away. An hour later, the sky was clear.