This morning, the city woke up with soft clock hands and breathing sidewalks.
At the crossroads of dreams, stepladders were sprouting like trees, inviting passersby to climb into the elastic sky.
At the hour when salt winks, a choir of watches began to drip onto the shop windows, buttering the brightness the way one spreads a confidence. Half-open suitcases released clouds folded into quarters, while the facades, courteous, leaned in to better hear the murmur of the cobblestones. In a doorless café, they served spoons full of shadow to those who wanted to sweeten their daydreams.
Passersby, having become lighter than their shoes, traded their itineraries for tide fans. A watchmaker in an apron of mist was dismantling time the way one peels a peach: skin of noon, pit of dusk, pulp of dawn. “The future is a damp tablecloth: you lay your hand on it and your fingers start to rustle,” confided the cartographer of mirages, Zélie Pâlichon, putting away a compass that was drawing circles inside silence.
Farther on, a staircase rose from the ground to climb into an absent balcony, and eggs hanging in the wind clicked with the modesty of little private tides. The streetlamps stretched their mustaches to the edge of the day’s bread, then drank the light in small sips, out of discretion. They say that tonight twilight will come in velvet gloves to gather the melted watches, and that it will lay them in a drawer of clouds where the second falls asleep without falling.
At midnight, if you listen close to the flagstones, you will hear the city fold its dream back with method: first the facades, then the footsteps, finally the sigh of the clock hands. Only a slight scent of mint and cold embers will remain, enough to remind us that sometimes reality takes off its shoes so as not to wake the impossible.
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