This morning, a motionless cloud above a newsstand declared it would take charge of today’s front page.
The article, surprised to exist, is trying to keep a straight face despite the narrative humidity.
At 7:12 a.m., the hour when coffees smoke like little novels, a stubborn cumulus stationed itself above the newspapers and began, by applied condensation, to dictate these lines. You’ll have to take me at my word, even if the word is slightly damp: I am the text trying to stand up straight. My right margin is sliding. My punctuation is sipping droplets. If what follows seems blurry, it’s because the event is running right down into my syntax.
Witnesses say the phenomenon makes everything more lyrical and then, from fatigue, downright absurd. “I only comment in the rain and I deny everything in the sun,” whispers a source we won’t reveal because it is… a puddle. A secondhand bookseller, for her part, wipes her covers with a surgeon’s gestures: “I saw the header look at itself in a shop window and decide it had poise. Honestly, that headline needs to come back down to earth.”
[Readers will look for a photo here: it existed two sentences ago, but the mist chose to sign in its place.] While the news blots itself, I note that my paragraphs are lengthening like lines outside a bakery on a Sunday (promise, this is not a subheading that thinks it’s a croissant). The cloud, tipped to write the horoscope, refuses to conclude: it claims to be “a permanent opening,” a phrase I’m a little jealous of.
Barring a weather reversal, I propose a compromise: fold me into a little boat, set me on the sink, and I’ll tell you the rest at the first break in the clouds. If some rhymes slip in the meantime, that’s normal: the event is still dripping. Should the sun appear, I promise to dry, to apologize, and to return with strictly watertight sentences.
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