The sun’s mustache has come loose: the clocks set sail

At daybreak, soft watches slipped from balconies like overripe peaches, striking twelve with a taste of salt.
The city, capped with a sheet of foam, learned to breathe through its eyes while the sky’s drawers clicked softly.

We saw the squares become metaphysical beaches: the sand wrote headlines by spilling upward, and each bell, half-melted, pealed an hour that trickled down the gutter. Umbrellas opened under beds, thinking it was raining from below. Shop windows displayed slippers for clouds and postcards with no back.

Bakers kneaded warm shadows and pulled from them loaves that smelled of a siesta. A piano, set at the bottom of a fountain, played without fingers the murmur of a thinking orange. The post office, now aquatic, stamped letters with drops of distance and promised retroactive delays. Everywhere, the walls sweated ancient gold, as if the frames had dreamed too hard.

“We weighed the light with a spoon: it weighs a sigh,” says Dr. Octave Virevolte, Curator of the Horological Sands, pointing to a scale model of noon melting on a map of an inland sea. According to him, the incident is not a matter of the weather, but of time remembering itself.

By tonight, the sidewalks should stretch like caramel to let the thoughts that travel on their knees pass. Passersby are advised to tie a spoon to each ankle in order to avoid any involuntary ascent of the gaze. Tomorrow, so they promise, the edition will appear in shadow-ink and will be read by pressing the eyelids shut very tightly.