Parachutes Away

He looked at the clouds that fled past him, hurtling upwards at a rate of knots. That couldn’t be good. He yanked on his parachute release and tried not to panic at the total absence of being jerked upwards, the lack of arrest to his downward motion. He performed a particularly graceful somersault which included a panoramic view of the ground below that his stomach could have done without.

As his heart hammered terror’s dirge in his ears and the wind snatched playfully at his grasping fingers, he fumbled for the secondary released. Somehow it didn’t surprise him that this also led to no cessation of his plummet towards what looked suspiciously like a tarmac runway. He wondered about the fabled ‘life flashing before your eyes’ story and why he wasn’t experiencing it. The only flashes he could see were those glinting off of the… wing?

He looked down through his legs, had a moment to wonder what a light aircraft was doing in the path of a registered parachute jump and then felt the yank as his parachute caught onto the tailplane. Interesting, he thought as he streamed out behind the plane, it is a landing strip. The plane began to descend…