Star, Bright

By MARK CLIFTON
There is no past or future, the children said ; it all just is! They had every reason to know!
Friday—June 11th
At three years of age, a little girl shouldn't have enough functioning intelligence to cut out and paste together a Moebius Strip.
Or, if she did it by accident, she surely shouldn't have enough reasoning ability to pick up one of her crayons and carefully trace the continuous line to prove it has only one surface.
And if by some strange coincidence she did, and it was still just an accident, how can I account for this generally active daughter of mine—and I do mean active —sitting for a solid half hour with her chin cupped in her hand, staring off into space, thinking with such concentration that it was almost painful to watch?
I was in my reading chair, going over some work. Star was sitting on the floor, in the circle of my light, with her blunt-nosed scissors and her scraps of paper.
Her long silence made me glance down at her as she was taping the two ends of the paper together. At that point I thought it was an accident that she had given a half twist to the paper strip before joining the circle. I smiled to myself as she picked it up in her chubby fingers.
A little child forms the enigma of the ages, I mused.
But instead of throwing the strip aside, or tearing it apart as any other child would do, she carefully turned it over and around—studying it from all sides.
Then she picked up one of her crayons and began tracing the line. She did it as though she were substantiating a conclusion already reached!
It was a bitter confirmation for me. I had been refusing to face it for a long time, but I could ignore it no longer.