The Stepmother Who Tried Too Hard

Once, in a world frayed thin by years of collapse, where cities smoldered under amber skies and the oceans had pulled back their tides, people clung to small, stubborn pockets of survival.

In one such place, a village cobbled together from the bones of the old world, there lived a woman named Marla.

Marla was a stepmother, a role that still carried whispers, even after civilization had dissolved under the weight of its own cleverness. She had married a widower who ran the village’s solar stills, and with him came two children: Elia and Bram.

Elia was nine and sharp as wire. Bram was six and watched everything with eyes like glass buttons.

Marla wanted them to love her.

She baked, not the ration-flat bricks everyone else gnawed, but honey-cakes spun from foraged sweetness and flour ground in her own cracked palms. She hugged, awkward at first, then earnestly, fiercely, until the children stiffened under the weight of her affection. She learned the lute from an old datapad, plucking songs from before the blackout, trying to fill their nights with something like gentleness.

But the children watched, and whispered.

“Why does she smile like that?” Elia hissed to Bram one night.

“She knows too many things,” Bram murmured back.

“Maybe she’s… a witch.”

In the old world, such suspicions might have withered under reason. But reason had gone the way of electricity, and what remained was instinct, myth, and fear.

Soon, the whispers spread.

“She grows herbs no one else can.”

“She hums in strange tongues at dawn.”

“She healed that fever too quickly, didn’t she?”

Marla, exhausted from the labor of love, saw the village eyes narrow, the spaces around her widen. She tried harder: more cakes, more songs, more stories by the dim firelight. She painted murals on the cracked walls of the schoolhouse, taught the children old dances, mended their threadbare coats.

But love, in this new age, was suspicious. Kindness, in the era of collapse, was an unnatural magic.

One dusk, under a bruised-purple sky, the children gathered in the square. Elia held a rusted pot lid as a crown. Bram carried a stick like a scepter.

“She bewitched us,” Elia declared. “She bewitched the whole village.”

Marla stared, the lute sliding from her hands. “Children… it was only love.”

But they had read too many old stories, half-remembered and half-invented. In those tales, witches smiled sweetly. They fed you honey before the hex.

The villagers watched, hollow-eyed, as the children danced their circling dance, weaving a rope of blame, of fear, of old fairy tales sharpened into knives.

By nightfall, the stake was built.

As the flames took her, Marla searched the faces of the crowd, hoping for a flicker of doubt, a break in the trance. But they only watched, their expressions blankly curious, not cruel, just children playing at the only power they had ever known.

The next morning, ash drifted through the streets like gray confetti.

Elia crowned herself queen of the block. Bram ruled the scavenged gardens.

And somewhere beyond the hills, the world folded further in on itself, a planet of orphans and emperors, burning through the last scraps of love they could no longer understand.