This morning, time left its numbers on the curb, and we skate in them wearing slippers of shadow.

Shop windows yawn, spoons cross themselves, and the sun, in a nightgown, resumes its standing nap.

A Rain of Soft Watches Declares the Dawn Open

At dawn, the city found itself draped in a caramel of hours: clocks slid from balconies like overripe fruit, and passersby picked seconds straight off the pavement to tuck them into their drawer-pockets. Newsstands unfolded lukewarm newspapers where the ink, seized by vertigo, wrote in undulations. Shoes were seen walking by themselves, guided by pensive laces, while a streetlamp, deeply moved, let fall a sigh of glass.

In the muffled tumult, the newsroom of the Unreasonable Times was overrun by independent mustaches that signed the editorial backward, so readers would read it while dreaming. Elephants with thread-legs were raising footbridges between the paragraphs, and each comma was a little chair where a breath sat. The linotypes, taken by the smell of invisible coffee, printed twenty editions of silence, all sold before they were heard.

“We folded noon into an accordion to breathe thirteen o’clock better, and if logic squeezes you, loosen a button of cloud,” confides the Concierge of Mirages, his hat filled with the salt of domestic stars. His statement, written on a ribbon of smoke, was archived in a drawer of downpour, next to a knife that was buttering the light. Witnesses, mouths open like music boxes, swore they had seen a calendar learn to swim.

This evening, the city announces, the wind will distribute programs embroidered with tender insomnia: an opening with a tinkling of empty shoes, an interlude of wisteria in a glass dress, and a finale in which the moon, set on a crutch, will savor a saucer of horizon milk. Until then, whoever finds a lost minute is asked to place it back delicately under a shadow: there it will take shape again, and perhaps it will sing, like a postage stamp dreaming of being a timbre of voice.