At dawn, the Central Clock slid like a peach in the sun, spreading a syrup of minutes across the sidewalks.
Passersby, capped with domestic clouds, gathered time up with butterfly nets.
This morning, the square woke up all soft velvet: the hands, bent by the heat of the dream, stretched out on the balconies like copper cats; drawers sprouted in the facades and, from their varnished insides, calendars folded into boats slipped free. A tram rolled on satin rails, leaving behind a smell of clockwork orange and damp chalk. At the kiosk, a lobster telephone rang three times, then fell silent, embarrassed by its own salt. Crutches, raised like poplars, held up the pale moon forgotten on a roof.
Witnesses speak softly, out of respect for the day’s nap. They say a piano, seized with modesty, covered itself in porcelain and swallowed its keys one by one, to better hear the silence grow. “I swear to you, the seconds were making bubbles under my tongue, as if noon had learned to swim,” confided Madame Girelle, a merchant of silence, still crowned with a wreath of dawn-crumbs. In the fountain, a spiral cornucopia—an improbable rhinoceros horn—was pouring not water, but ready-to-use crumbs of shadow.
Specialists in the diagonal nap advance a hypothesis: the city yawned too wide. The sand in the hourglass, caught in sea spray, went in search of the nearest sea and scattered into sea-minutes, hence this lukewarm tide on the cobblestones. In the library, the words chose weightlessness: ink butterflies settled on the pediments, beating their wings to the rhythm of a metronome without an arm. Ladders of bread still climb, straight and golden, toward an eggshell sky.
At dusk, mustaches were seen to become sundials and hats to brood storm eggs to utter tenderness. The shop windows stretched out to yawn with elegance, and the dusk, polished like a pocket stone, slipped into the sleeves of jackets. Tomorrow, promises the interior weather forecast, it will rain light drawers: everyone will be able to tuck a dream inside, with a spare crutch and a little hour syrup for the journey.
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