The Curse

There once was a lovely, but vain princess who spurned every pauper and prince who wooed her for none were “handsome enough or rich enough” to deserve her. One such suitor's mother was a powerful witch. Being the loving, but overbearing mother that she was, she took none too kindly to the gross abuse her sweet and compassionate son suffered under the princess's cruel hand, and so she cursed the damsel that she would be a tree until she could learn to love someone for their heart and not their superficialities and accidents of birth.

Decades passed and she only grew more resentful. Her new branches and roots grew wild, blocking the paths of those who would pass her and not marvel at her perfection. Apples fell rotten from her branches, for those who came to collect didn't deserve her fruits. Offering nothing worth eating and slowing travel besides, people began to view the tree as a better source for firewood than food. She, in turn, would grow fruit more foul, for why would she want to help those who abused her?

One day, a scraggly farmer found the tree and brought it fertilizer and tended to the moss that had leeched its nutrients away. “How can a tree grow proper fruit if it grows in such poor conditions?” He trimmed the tree and cared for it, and soon it grew good fruit. When the farmer ate the first good fruit the tree had ever born, there was a flash of light and the tree was once more a princess. However, she had spent too many years as a tree, gnarled and bitter and ugly, and the very wrath that caused her to twist her limbs to spite others in the past now had turned her into a grotesque mockery of what she once was.

She was withered and old, a hideous mass of writhing, misshapen limbs and rough and rotten flesh. The farmer ran in horror suspecting that the tree had, in fact, been a hideous beast only pretending to be a tree to lure him in close and devour him. All her past misdeeds had come back to haunt her in each extra arm or withered stump. That's when she learned the witch's real curse. That others would see her as she truly was. 


Originally mailed to K. Bravo of Olathe, Kansas