"The Balloon" by Donald Barthelme (1966)

@Lyla Trilling's rec of "Sticks" by George Saunders brought Donald Barthelme to my mind, and with it this short-short story (not as short as "Sticks," but still only about 1,800 words)—a surreal and beautifully written bit of metafiction in which the narrator inflates a giant balloon over Manhattan. And the man knows how to stick a landing.

(I might have linked to the New Yorker, where it originally ran, instead of this bootleg Sixty Stories PDF, but it's hard to overstate how much it infuriates me that they stuck an auto-playing video window directly before the final paragraph.)