Gauging Moonlight
by E. Catherine Tobler
The alien narrator loves Alice Oxbridge, although the word love does not capture
the feeling any more accurately than space travel captures climbing into a vehicle
capable of carrying you off-planet. And our narrator has the power to erase the moments
of tragedy in Alice’s life, but he cannot do so without breaking his one unbreakable
tenet and becoming the prime example of sentient idiocy.
Alice’s was not the first birth I witnessed, nor even the most unusual. The first time
I saw Alice’s birth, I bypassed the event, skimming ahead to the advent of the
automobile. Gears fascinated me more. But on reflection, something drew me back to Alice
in the garden, newborn on the rain-wet grass. The world seemed to move beneath her.
“Gauging Moonlight” by E. Catherine Tobler, in
Sci Fiction, 20 July 2005.