The original note, as written at the time
A concept for space time manipulation. There is a boy who can freeze all chemical and physical changes in the universe. However he himself isn’t aware of what he does. He is only 4 years old and he thinks it is merely fun. In fact many such boys exist and have existed throughout history. However, they gain the ability when they turn 4 and when they turn 5 they lose the ability completely.
Ongoing development
The kettle had been on the fire for a quarter of an hour and the water was still cold.
His mother lifted it, looked inside, set it down again, and said nothing, because there was nothing to say. She had put it on herself. She had watched it. She put it on again and it stayed cold, and by the evening she had stopped calling it strange and started calling it the kettle, as though the kettle had always been like that.
He was four. He was in the yard, turning over a beetle with a stick, and where the stick touched the beetle the beetle did not move, and where the sun fell on the beetle’s back the sun did not warm it, and the ant that had been carrying a crumb since morning was still exactly where it had been since morning, with the crumb, in the same attitude, neither further nor nearer.
It is important to understand that he was not doing anything. There was no effort and no intent and no cruelty in it. He was simply interested in the beetle and the beetle was worth being interested in, and around him the universe had politely stopped.
His grandmother knew. She was the only one who knew, because she was old enough to have heard the stories told properly — not the way they were told now, as riddles for children, but the way they were told by people who had seen it. That there is a child every generation or so, that the child is four, that the child is not aware, and that at five the thing leaves as quietly as it came.
She did not tell the mother. What would she have said. Your son has stopped the ants and the kettle, and in eleven months he will stop, and you will never be able to prove any of it.
What she did instead was sit in the yard with him, every afternoon, and watch what he watched. That is the whole of the story for a while. An old woman and a small boy and the ordinary world going still around them in patches, and a beetle that would eventually move and could never be asked about it afterwards.