A child learning that their planet moves, so when they jump up, they can never come down in exactly the same place.
Paulie considered the sidewalk. It had been in front of her house forever. Mom let her draw on it before it rained. This time, the chalk in Paulie’s hand had been purloined from the art box in secret.
She made an X on the pavement. Right by her gate. And stood on it carefully. Concentrated. Jumped!
And came down on the very X she started from.
Except… not quite.
Paulie, very carefully, drew around her own sandals before jumping again.
Her feet refused to land in exactly the same place.
‘Gramma’ Joe, the oldest lady in the neighbourhood, was walking her pug towards Paulie. The old lady saw what Paulie was doing and laughed. “So you’ve heard, then.”
“Heard what?” challenged Paulie, not one to surrender information easily.
“The planet is moving. And you’re testing it yourself. I remember doing the exact same thing, though I was older than you at the time.”
“You’re always older than me,” countered Paulie.
“Well let me tell you something, miss. It’s as true as the fact that all grownups used to be babies.”
The pug, Dominic, sniffed and snuffled at Paulie’s ankles. This was the first time she ignored him, because she was too busy boggling at Gramma Joe and trying to imagine her as ever being a baby.
“The ground under your feet is part of a planet that is spinning around its axis at a thousand miles an hour. And the planet itself is orbiting the sun at sixty-seven thousand miles an hour.”
“What’s a thousand?”
“It’s ten times one hundred.”
Paulie blew a raspberry. “Numbers never get that big. That’s imaginary.”
Gramma Joe chuckled. “There’s more than you think in this universe. The sun also moves. It’s busy orbiting the heart of our galaxy. And the galaxy is moving. For all we know? Our universe itself moves. Even if you come back to the same relative point you started at, it has moved in space and time.”
Paulie looked down at her feet, and Dominic, who had perched on her toes so he could bite his own leg. Even though she was standing still, if Gramma Joe wasn’t spinning a make-believe story, she was moving at squidillions of miles an hour.
“Why can’t we feel it?”
Gramma Joe smiled. “We’re moving, too.”
It all seemed too incredible to believe.
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