Noon That Doesn't Believe Itself

This hour, stone stops being stone.

The shadow of one building falls across another, and the lit one takes it in – melts just enough to wear a shape not its own. The arches lose their edges. The cornices dissolve into a sky that has stopped being sky too, the same white, overheated substance as everything else. Nothing dares to hold its ground this hour – even stone borrows a silhouette that isn't its.

People move across the square. Passersby. As if surfacing briefly from the past. They cross one another's paths without sound, without weight, without shadows – some hurrying, some pausing – as though the city, heated to whiteness, had lifted for a moment those whose footsteps it had long since absorbed. They walk through a light that doesn't recognize them.

And then – red.

A point in the square that refuses to dissolve.

A child. His shadow – short, dark, stitched to his feet like a promise – the only shadow in this whole blinded world. He has no past yet.

He walked straight through the crowd. The passersby thinned as he neared and gathered again behind him. He nudged a small stone with the toe of his shoe and followed where it rolled.

Then the windows lost their depth. The columns went flat. The balconies hung in the air for no reason at all. All that centuries had built into the city's weight turned out to be only an agreement between light and shadow.

I narrowed my eyes. And everything that had looked solid became temporary, and the temporary became the only real thing in the frame.

A thick stroke on the canvas – the only way to hold the melting before it's finished melting. The way dust settles on old cornices, so the paint settles too: heavy, thick, as if wanting to become eternal itself, already knowing it can't.

I carried that gaze home. It lay in me a long time without a shape, until one day it was born again on canvas – no longer a city, but a question the light had asked: which of us truly casts a shadow?

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The story, read aloud · 3:13

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