I wish I could say I was pushed out, but it was my own decision to jump. I filled the pilot with horror, not having packed a 'chute even from the discard pile. Almost immediately I regretted it.

But what could I do?

My glasses were blown off first, so I did not view the crisp details of a model-train town rushing toward me. I saw no crashing trains knock over depots. No tiny cars gliding along rulers, no obsessive cornfields, no convoluted mountains, no Las Vegas radiating into the sky in the middle of a black sea-an island no man is. That was especially a let down.

Limbs akimbo-yoga, Kama Sutra poses flipping by like a thumb book movie — I made love to the wind who pierced me to the bone with his Eros, and froze my genitals my intimate apparel having been torn off as I had neglected to don my gay sky-diving suit. I dove like a swallow in a courting ritual.

Because I could not stop. Because kindly he.

My life didn't flash before my eyes, but somebody's life rushed through my ears — a cell phone playing "Ode to Joy," children shouting, "Shut up!" din of a mall, forks on china, laugh tracks from the rows of TVs at Sears, the airplane propeller I remembered so nostalgically. O come angel band.

Still, I could not catch my death.

I fell through noon and starry night through the center of the V of geese, through clouds whose inviting contours promised trampoline fun. If the wind hadn't blow off my undergarments I would have wet them, instead of drenching myself, which fortunately I couldn't feel having been frost bitten.

Did I forget to mention the singing coyotes? The roar of flour? The music of a trash bag as I struggled to open it?

Karen Holman is a social worker and an advocate for people with mental illness in Detroit. Summers she tends her native zinnia garden. Winters she enjoys ice sculpture. Her work has aired over NPR as part of the Iowa Radio Project. Her work is forthcoming in the Portland Review and has appeared in Pool, Sentence, Pavement, Berkeley Poetry Review, Distillery, Tattoo Highway, and Yellow Silk. She's served on the editorial staff of Iowa Woman. Ms. Holman graduated with an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Iowa. She lives with her husband and their delightful cat, Rosalie.