Every Fifteen Minutes

Someone held a telescope on it eleven hours: a world with no sun, where it is never morning, the coldest of its kind, seven and a half light-years out. Every fifteen minutes they took its light, the way you look in on someone sleeping.

What came back was weather. Water clouds, in patches, thickening and thinning as the thing turned.

Which is the report from my window this Sunday: nine degrees, nearly all cloud, yesterday's rain gone down the drains, one paler place over the roofs that might be the sun or might not.

The first time anyone read a sky past the edge of our own planets, it said what ours says most days: some, then less, then some.