TIME MELTS ON THE STALL: THE CITY WALKS BACKWARD IN SHOES OF SMOKE

This morning, the clock hands resigned to become mustaches and lie down on varnished oranges.
The city, in cloud slippers, woke with its pockets full of an altogether liquid time.

On Useless Planks Square, the market of dreams opened early: jars of trembling hours, minutes in jelly, and dry seconds stacked like postcards from the future. In the shade of crutch-parasols, a steeple leaned down to taste a brine of dusk; the cobblestones, seized by a courteous shiver, secretly traded their shadows for ribbons of salt. The statues, for their part, coughed up butterflies of shadow before putting their thoracic drawers back in alphabetical order.

At the stall of the Master Watchmaker of the Tides, they offer repairs for soft memories: a brush of oil to re-inflate withered noons, a sponge to erase Sundays that bleed, and dream bulbs to light the vertical nap. “The day slipped through an invisible seam, and the night set its wig on my cup of coffee; I paid for my coffee with three sighs and a piece of silence,” confides Hortense Cabriole, seller of secondhand minutes, stirring a bucket of ill-arranged dawns.

Further on, a herd of household mirrors chews over landscapes that do not belong to them: beaches with mustaches, apples that fall asleep standing up, suitcases learning to walk balanced on swallow-threads. A bread cart barks softly, held on a leash by a thread of chalk; a fish, polished like a spoon, breathes matches without igniting the air. The merchants recommend not feeding the reflections after noon: they acquire a taste for memories and refuse to go back into their frames.

At the signal of a suspended violin, the clouds tame the roofs by promising them a nap with a view of the inside of things. Posters announce a sale on foldable horizons and storms to go; they also swear that a rain of keys will shortly open the wardrobes where the Sundays of yesteryear slumber. Until then, the city breathes backward and footsteps write parentheses on the dust, while the news, very official and perfectly unverifiable, confirms: today, time is drunk through a straw.