Clocks Learn to Swim on a Velvet Sidewalk

At dawn, time melted into rivers of amber, leaving the city to dry on an invisible wire stretched between two sighs.
In the sky, drawers opened by themselves, spreading scents of warm chalk and salt that dreams.

This morning, at the crossroads of the Silent Sands, clocks unfastened from the walls slid toward the shop windows like lacquer jellyfish, their hands folding the air into fans. A lobster telephone rang with the sound of a seashell, while seatless chairs, propped on long crutches of shadow, patiently waited for a feather to decide to fall upward. Hinged eggs were seen to open slightly, yawning small postcards of the desert.

“Time doesn’t run late; it stretches in order to better listen to empty shells,” declares Arielle Souffle, horologist of the tides, in front of a stall of taxidermied moustaches. “I measured the second with a tape measure: it exceeds the minute by three sighs and a porcelain purr.” She specifies that the dials, now amphibious, prefer “shy puddles” to jacket pockets, where the dust tells them too many memories.

Further on, violins put down roots and begin to photosynthesize nocturnes, while a giraffe of smoke very politely catches fire to warm a bouquet of keys without locks. The cobblestones, out of decency, close their eyes when figures with drawers pass, pulling from their own hips napkins embroidered with fireflies. The cloud merchants, overwhelmed, announce a shortage of foldable cumuli; dreamers are therefore advised to carry the storm in a spoon.

By late morning, the tide of hands should ebb, leaving on the sand a few peach-skin calendars and oysters containing never-before-seen commas. Passersby are asked to walk backward so as not to frighten the still-wild minutes; it is said that, around noon, an invisible bell will applaud softly, and that the city, set back on its crutch of light, will catch its breath again, snickering into its sleeve of foam.