Watches in puddles, a moustached city: noon tips over

The city, caught red-dreaming, watched its clocks liquefy and its squares stretch out like shadow-cats.
Nothing serious, say specialists in daytime sleep: you just have to learn to walk on the backs of minutes.

At dawn, time lost its bones. Balconies yawned down to the sidewalk, shop windows shed their skin, and the bell towers, seized by modesty, wrapped themselves in warm towels. In the gutters, drops of noon sped toward the sea in flip-flops; on the benches, velvet gloves held hands with newspapers still warm with horizon. A dust merchant pitched a tent of silence to weigh the seconds to the gram, while the crosswalks, damp with dreams, slipped off at a tangent.

At the Conservatory of Applied Dreams, instruction manuals printed on household clouds are being handed out. Official advice: fasten your favorite minute to a shirt button, lightly butter your shadow before going out, and breathe backwards when the doors start to neigh. “Gravity is only a semicolon with a bad haircut,” murmurs Professor Azura Lépine, tracing a parabola on a crumpled tablecloth. She claims the heart beats better when you speak to it through a straw.

Witnesses say they saw a piano stick out its tongue and lick a sonata down to the bone of silence. “I recognized myself in a puddle of clock, and politely asked a sleeping shoe for directions,” says Gaspard Serpillère, a dust tamer on variable time. Others report that the staircases, moved, began to carry people down with the delicacy of fresh sheets; several traffic lights, caught by the smell of bread, spent their morning picking up luminous crumbs.

While waiting for the facades to regain their facade-rigidity, the fountains wear gloves so as not to wet the silence, and the boulevards are learning to wink. A drizzle of stamp-sized glances is forecast for this evening, to be stuck behind the ear so the night knows where you dream. Tomorrow, if everything unrolls, we’ll roll the sky up like a carpet and shake the stardust over the tablecloths: they call that, so they say, laying time flat again.