The spell

A 2020 fairy tale

Once upon a time, a boy was born, and his father didn’t love him. The boy had all the toys in the world, and he always got everything he wanted, just the way he wanted it. His father made sure of it. He also made sure every game the boy played was rigged, so he would always win. Maybe his father thought this was a fair substitute for love, or maybe he thought it was love. In any case, the boy kept winning, and winning, and winning, and his father told him that meant everyone else was a loser. The boy didn’t know why all this winning never made him happy. He never understood why despite everything, his father looked at him like he was a loser, too.

The boy grew up to be small man, and a sad man, but also a cruel man. Winning was the only thing that made him feel good, or that made him feel anything at all. Eventually his father died, but the man still heard his voice in his head and in his heart. You are a loser, his dead father would whisper. I am not! the man would scream back. I’ll show you! The man piled bricks of his father’s gold around him until he had built himself a house, which he said was a palace. Only winners had palaces, after all. 

The man used his gold to put on shows about how good he was at winning. Some people believed him, and their attention felt like the love his father never gave him. Or at least that’s what he thought; he would never know that real love feels so much better. When people started paying attention to other things, he thought he might die. He couldn’t bear the thought of people forgetting that he was the best winner there ever was.

So the man cast a spell over all the land. The spell made everyone look at him, and think about him, and act like he was important. No one had ever loved him, and no one ever would. But now they would never be without him, not even inside their own heads, and that meant he would never be alone. No one could ever make him feel like a loser again.

Some people enjoyed living under the spell. When the man called other people losers, it made them feel like winners. They liked seeing him be cruel, because it gave them permission to be cruel themselves. Other people hated having to think about the man all the time, and they felt like the spell had taken away a piece of their minds and their souls. They talked and talked and talked about how much they hated him. That, too, was part of the spell.

And then one day, the spell was broken. It happened slowly, and then all at once. It wasn’t just one person who broke it, but many people working together. It took them a long time to be able to see that the man wasn’t important or invincible, even though he was loud and cruel and everywhere, and it took them even longer to convince others of the truth. At last, enough people could see the spell for the illusion it always was, and that meant they could cast it off, together.

The man screamed and screamed, bewildered as to why the spell had stopped working. He tried casting the spell again by screaming uglier and uglier words, words he thought no one could ignore. But the people ignored them all the same. Freed from the man’s constant presence in their minds, they could finally see themselves and each other clearly. They could see they weren’t who he had said they were. They could see what the man’s cruelty had done, and how to help fix it. Soon they were too busy to pay any attention to the man at all.

The man went back to his palace and found it had turned to straw. Somehow he had lost even his father’s gold. He screamed again, trying to drown out his father’s disappointment. He never stopped screaming, for as long as he lived. But the spell was broken, and no one was listening.