At daybreak, the kiosk clocks melted like buttered slices forgotten on the sun’s ear.
Passersby, surprised to be late to their own shadows, ladled up minutes gone lukewarm.
On Mirage Square, the cobblestones breathe against the light and the fountain serves seconds on tap, frothy like clouds that have learned rhythmic gymnastics. Coats sway by themselves on roving hangers, and when they yawn, you glimpse shelves of neatly arranged seashells, each naming the memory it holds. Suitcase elephants, perched on legs as tall as rumors, solemnly carry music eggs that will, they say, hatch into fishbone waltzes.
At the Market of Mists, one buys silence by the meter and spare moons, folded into eighths, in kraft paper. The greengrocers weigh sighs on tea scales; the heaviest, they argue, are the sighs that smell of iodine. A public bench has started to sprout drawers and hands out postcards from the inside of the head: velvet beaches, checkered rains, and an alley where the windows wear mint mustaches. A chaise longue, exasperated with being horizontal, has taken to the vertical and parades with anise-scented crutches.
“It’s not a malfunction; it’s a bashfulness of the real,” says Octave Crampon, a sleepwalking watchmaker at the Museum of Soft Hours. “When the hand melts, it finally admits it has never known how to point at anything but the nap. You have to butter time so it slips better between your fingers; otherwise it crumbles into crumbs.”
By late afternoon, a notice to dreamers was posted on the leaning streetlamp: please do not feed the metaphors; they come back at night and demand tips in drops of ink. Tomorrow a high sea in the drawers is forecast, with gusts of backward flowers; it is recommended to take out your drawer umbrellas and wrap your memory in newspaper, in case the dates start meowing again.
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