Today at the Y

I was grinding away on the elliptical this afternoon, listening to the Moth podcast on my i-pod, staring through the floor-to-ceiling window in an anaerobic stupor, out across the vacant field behind the Y. Blue-gray clouds hung over the flat central Florida plain. Beyond the field lay the municipal airport and the sky-diving school. First one, then two, then a swarm of brightly colored parachutes emerged silently from the low ceiling, midway between the top of my view and the horizon.

They fell in swelling uncountable clusters, each chute dressed in its own multi-hued pattern – as if a circus troop were invading the Dutch low country in ’44. Masses of vertical squiggles twisted and swayed from their horizontal vessels of air, as they descended soundlessly from the billowy vapor – an HD video of sperm invading a viscous cloud of salmon eggs ran in reverse just for my amusement.