By Nicole Hanson
The prompt for this piece was generated from an AI generator. I entered a couple of sentences from my novel, NOEL Forgotten, and it came up with this:
The story of a boy who has to grow up faster than his father because he is cursed by the woman who is not his mother and cannot love him. He has to stay drunk to slow down the curse.
I thought the prompt was funny and I knew I had to write something from it. It took some time and a little imagination, but I ended up writing a short story.
Photo By Shaiith Licensed from Envato Elements
Davey and his father, Adam, lived alone in a small cottage in the middle of the woods. They spent their days hunting and fishing and living off the land. One day, Rose wandered into the woods and stumbled across Davey and Adam, gathering berries. She was lost and needed help to find her way home. Adam was captivated by her beauty and offered to escort her to town, which would take several days. Davey went with them, of course, because he was only a small boy and couldn’t be left alone. Little did they know Rose was a witch, searching for a companion.
At the end of the fourth day, they reached the town, but Rose enchanted Adam to marry her and to never return to the woods. Rose often had to compete with Davey for Adam’s attention and grew to resent the boy because she wanted Adam all to herself. One day, while Davey was sleeping, she placed a curse upon the boy. Each sunrise, the boy would age a year. She knew it would only be a matter of weeks before the boy became a man and after several months, the boy would grow old and die leaving Rose and Adam to live alone in peace. Rose knew all curses contain a loophole, but she was certain Davey would never discover it.
Every day, Davey woke a year older, and he tried to tell his father something was wrong, but Adam never listened. He suspected his stepmother was a witch but didn’t know how to prove this to his father. At the sunrise on the twelfth day, Davey woke as a man, so Adam took him to the tavern to celebrate. Davey sampled ales and spirits and by the end of the night, they stumbled home drunk. Davey liked the taste of the drinks and went back to the tavern for the next several days. It was then he realized he had stopped aging, but his stepmother had developed wrinkles and her hair was turning gray.
Every night, Davey came home drunk and the next morning, Rose aged another year. He kept going back to the tavern until Rose was weak and could no longer walk. Adam stayed by her bedside, and as she exhaled her last breath, the curse broke, turning Davey back into a little boy. Adam wept as he realized Rose had enchanted him and cursed his son. He scooped Davey into his arms and ran back into the woods to their small cottage, where they lived in peace.
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