The town was evil. But the children? They were still pure, there was still good in their hearts, trickling out of their mouth and ears and gentle hands.
She stayed there for years, trying to protect them as much as she can. Even after the villagers had enough of a witch living amongst them, she still took in the lost children.
Every parent’s worst nightmare is their children growing up. The witch was no different.
Her kids, they called her mama once. And now when they passed her as adults, they didn’t even give her a second glance. As far as she figured, they didn’t remember her at all.
(She’d tried talking to Benjamin once, one of her favourites, because he had been a clingy child who couldn’t bear to leave her side. He was thirty when she tried visiting him. When she approached him, he treated her kindly, but the kind of pleasantness you show to strangers and not someone you call your mother.)
The witch was sad, of course. But there was nothing she could do; they had to go, sooner or later.
One of her boys entered her room. “Mama?”
It was Peter, her oldest. He was turning eighteen in a couple of days, and soon it would be his turn to leave.
It hurt her to see him already.
“I am leaving soon,” Peter said. A statement, not a question. “But I don’t want to.”
“You have to, love. None of your siblings wanted to leave,” she answered, simply. “But the hour you turn eighteen, you’ll forget. And you’ll wander off, and then you’ll never find your way back.”
Peter looked sulky. “Isn’t there some way to make me not forget? I don’t want to forget you, ever.”
She almost laughed because of how close she was to crying. Her boy. Her sweet, sweet boy.
He slammed the door behind her when he left. Peter had always been a fiery one.
When she opened the door on the day of Peter’s eighteenth birthday, she expected him to be gone by then.
Instead, her boy was sitting on the bed cross-legged, holding an empty bottle.
He had drunk a potion. An anti-aging potion.
“I found a way, mama,” he said, his eighteen-year-old hands clasping here, firmly. “I don’t want to forget you.”
He left, too, when he got bored of being cooped up in the house with no company. But he visited her every few years, bringing her stories of how he visited children, following in her footsteps.
They called him Peter Pan, the boy who never grows up.
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