At dawn, time unhooked itself from the wall and stretched out across the square, gleaming like apricot jam upon astonished cobblestones.
Passersby, weighted with seashells, walk in whispers so as not to wake the minutes sleeping in the folds of the air.
In the city, the bell towers yawn and stretch their shadows into stilts up to the windows where freshly ironed dreams hang. Drawers open in the flank of the square and release ink butterflies that settle on the shoulders of statues. A rain of keys, refusing any lock, clinks down as metallic dew on umbrellas turned inside out like surprised mouths.
Near the kiosk, the watchmaker stretches a clothesline between two clouds and pins the hours to it, which drip in golden drops. “Since this morning, noon refuses to stand up and melts like fondue over my fingers; I fitted it with sugar crutches, but it prefers to crawl toward the shade,” he confides, his gaze planted in a magnifying glass where fish of light swim past. The hands, stricken with scruples, draw perfect circles just to let silence glide along them.
At the market, squares of sky folded into napkins are for sale, to be unfurled when memory is thirsty. A woman weighs the wind on the scales and gives change in crumbs of blue; a child scoops up his own shadow with a spoon and tucks it into the pocket of a jacket that smells of cinnamon. The river, vexed by logic, runs up the stairs four at a time and sits for a moment, streaming, on the bench of a coachman without a horse.
At 12:14, the Sun curls its mustaches at the edge of a pond-mirror and signs today’s edition with a stubborn stroke of light. The windows bat their eyelids, chatty with reflections; the cobblestones, at last, cover themselves with a tablecloth so that time’s nap won’t be cold. We are promised for tomorrow a polka-dotted sky, and the rumor of a storm that plays the cello with a lock of hair found in the wind’s secret pocket.
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