The Midnight Parade of Tralalero Tralala

Tralalero Tralala lived between the shutters and the chimneys, an accordion for a chest and a hat too many for one head. It did not speak in syllables so much as in pull-and-release — the sound folded like laundry and spilled into the cobblestones. Once every month, at an hour when the baker’s oven still sighed warm and the alley cats were negotiating treaties, Tralalero called. The sound was a summons and a kind of weather. People came out with slippers and umbrellas, because that was the only sensible thing to do when music rearranged gravity. The parade was not grand; it was particular. The lamp-posts bent to listen, a porter wheeled a cart of leftover polenta that turned into dancers, and small things that had gone missing — a button, a lost earring, a single shoe — trotted back into their owners’ hands synchronized to the bellows. Tralalero marched at the front, accordion chest pulsing with the memory of a hundred refrains, while the others followed in hesitant, delighted stumbling: a barrel that coughed confetti, a small dog with the voice of a tuba, a woman whose braid kept unspooling and retying itself into new punchlines. The parade’s rule was strange and tender: it could ask you to forget something for the sake of laughing. An old man offered up a grievance — a debt, a sharp word — and the parade accepted it with a twirl. He forgot what made him heavy, and the world grew lighter. But the parade never took important things: it refused a child’s name, a family recipe, a promise carved on the underside of a bench. Tralalero’s music seemed to know the difference; the bellows would stiffen like a saved breath if the melody approached a thing that must stay. When morning came, the town smelled of toasted bread and new possibilities. People found themselves humming parts of the parade all day, as if they had smuggled fragments of moonlight home in their pockets. Tralalero trailed off into the chimneys, leaving behind a single accordion button shaped like a crescent moon. The button sat on the steps for a week, and whoever pressed it found, for a few breathless moments, they could walk backward through a memory and laugh at the parts that used to make them cry.