Hazel by Ricky Garni

Hazel filled the football with helium and the old lawyer kicked it as hard as he could and it went over one house and stuck in the chimney of another. The old couple in that house had a fire going in their fireplace and the smoke soon filled the room. If Hazel had known, she would have raced into the house to save them, but Hazel isn’t real: she is just a character in a television show, and everything she says is written on a piece of paper, and even everything she does is written on a piece of paper, and she has no paper that says: run into the house and save the old couple from certain death, because the old people are also not real people, even though they are old, and by now, they are gone, for certain, as real people do, for many years have passed since Hazel went over to a man and said, “Do you mind if I fill this football with helium?” and the man, who also wasn’t real, replied, “Now why would you want to go and do a thing like that?”

Ricky Garni was born in Miami and grew up in Florida and Maine. He works as a graphic designer by day and writes music by night. COO, a tiny collection of short prose printed on college lined paper with found materials such as coins, stamps and feathers, was recently released by Bitterzoet Press.