Watches Melt at Dawn: The City Drinks Its Shadow with a Teaspoon

In a chiming of feathers, the hour spread like honey across the warm sidewalks, while drawers sprouted from the tree trunks.
Passersby stowed their sighs on crutches of light, and a goldfish struck noon by batting its eyelashes.

At daybreak, the facades pivoted like lazy mirrors and the balconies tipped their wrought iron to lap up a bit of sky. The trams, turned into porcelain whales, glided without rails among the public benches, which set about ruminating on faded postcards. Long ants, gloved in velvet, conducted the silent inventory of the cobblestones, while soft clocks rode the rooftops and fell asleep on the weathervanes.

Rumor claims that a child blew on a cloud until it became a tablecloth, and that the city’s breakfast served itself upon it: tilted cups, contemplative slices of toast, jam that wrote its own initials. Elephants on stilt-legs drifted by in weightlessness, carrying obelisks of powdered sugar, and the metro exhaled pale roses with each breath, perfuming the crowd with a “No Entry” to seriousness.

“Time left its key under my threshold and asked me to feed it warm minutes,” declares Maître Coriolís, liquid watchmaker and neighborhood storyteller. “I didn’t dare refuse: since then, the seconds stand straight like matches and catch fire when you look at them too much.” In the shadow of a clock stretched out in all its copper, a hesitant violin confirmed the authenticity of the phenomenon, then folded back into its case like a satisfied insect.

This evening, the inner weather reports, a shower of light pianos will fall on the square, soft as a dry sheet. The streets will be waxed by the moon, which will beat time at the tip of a translucent cane; it is recommended to walk backward so as not to crease the freshly ironed silhouettes. In the middle, a giant egg, set on a stool, will think very hard about morning — and, if all goes well, the city will wake up inside its yolk.