by Ellen Datlow
“Fie on you,” said Ronda. “Fie, fie, fie.”
Jack the Lesser watched her pack up what passed for a reticule—a fallen leaf from the beanstalk twined round three times with a good stout vine runner—and then he watched her leave. She did not look back. “Good-bye,” he called. The ladybugs tried to distract him from his sorrow by doing a little dance. “Oh, stop it,” said Jack the Lesser. “I’m not in the mood.”
Moses, Bathsheba, and Arthur C. Clarke continued to do something approximating a conga line. Or perhaps they were coming down with a virus.
Ronda told the Queen Mother, “My name is Rindabella of Damp Meadows. I know some things you should know.”
“Bedwad, stop that caterwauling and come here,” snapped his mother.
“If you’re trying to marry me off to that foul creature, I’m not interested,” he replied, not looking up from his music sheets.
“He’s hopeless as well as rude,” said the Queen Mother.
“He’s a king,” said Ronda, and shrugged her shoulders. She took out the golden egg. “There’s more where this came from.”
“What an unusual talent,” said the Queen Mother. “Bedwad, get over here at once.”
“I didn’t produce it,” said Ronda, and then kicked herself. She’d just lost a possible invitation to join the the Royal Family through the financial plan called matrimony. “But I know where they can be had.”
“For what?”
“For a price.”
“Like your freedom and your life?” said the Queen Mother. “Otherwise it’s the dungeon, the guillotine, various slow-working poisons that induce pain in your limbs even after they’ve been severed from your torso. Think it over.”
“Sounds like a fair deal,” said Ronda, sighing. “There’s a goose, you see.”
Lonely for a thrill, and being uninterested in the wispy lisping maidens his mother was busy shopping for on his behalf, Jack the Greater made a final trip up the beanstalk. When he returned, carrying a harp under his arm, the harp was carrying on in fluting tones, rather too loud to be considered sweet. A contingent of soldiers at the base of the beanstalk was waiting to arrest him.
“What’s the charge?” said Jack.
“Withholding payment of taxes!” said the Captain of the Guards.
La Tilda screamed, “That Rotten Ronda squealed about our goose! It’s been impounded by the Treasury!”
“Ah, Ronda,” said Jack the Greater, sighing. “You shouldn’t have fired her, see?”
“She’s a slut and a tramp! She’s sold us out! I’ll rip out her eyes when I see her! From this day forward I have no other foe!”
“Foe,” sang the harp, a bit maliciously, it seemed. “Foe, foe, foe.”
“Leave it to me,” said Jack to his mother. “I’ll bargain our freedom again by presenting this harp to the King as a token of our remorse and affection. Meanwhile, where’s the moron gone?
“He’s taken his bugs to church for a blessing. He thinks they’re about to commit mass suicide or something.”
“Into the tumbrel with you,” said the Captain of the Guards apologetically. The harp sang on.
Annoyed at his mother, the King accepted the golden harp in exchange for the freedom of La Tilda and her son. “We have nothing else to give you,” said La Tilda. “We’re back to mud.” But she knew the pot that presented them with ample and deluxe victuals was still on the premises back home. Maybe they could start a tavern.
They were hardly at the wrought iron gates when they heard the harp begin to trill out songs of revolt, anthems of sedition. “Is that La Marseillaise?” asked La Tilda. “Mercy, it possesses a clear and a penetrating timbre, that harp. Good riddance to it.”
The soldiers caught up with them before they’d even reached the house and imprisoned them again for inculcating treasonous musical literature in the harp they’d donated to the King.
“Don’t be too worried,” said Jack the Greater. “More trouble is on its way. There’s a giant upstairs bound to be able to hear that noisy harp. He’ll be down the stalk in a flash and then that feeble King won’t know what’s hit him.”
The harp took a rest from time to time. In the intervals, Jack the Greater and La Tilda could hear the executioner sharpening the ax that would be used to cut off their heads.
“Do you think Jack the Lesser might rescue us?” said La Tilda, picking a ladybug off her shoulder and crushing it between her fingers.
“We lose our heads at four o’clock,” said Jack the Greater.
He was hard at work, was Jack the Lesser.
“Now, friends,” he said, “I know you’re suffering from a sense of mass inferiority. The presence of this beanstalk in our midst has made you question your very stature in the universe. Some of you have become dissatisfied, and others, apathetic. But if we all work together we can effect great changes. Everyone line up and ring the stalk at my shoulder height. Come along, Eudora. Don’t dawdle, Jane. You too, Winona. On the count of three.”
As he counted three, so did the clock towers in the town. There was an hour left before the beheading of his closest kin. “Now, chew as if your lives depended on it,” he said. And seventy-four ladybugs set to work, gnawing through the beanstalk. The sound was something like fum fum, fum fum.
At five minutes to four the executioner split the hair of a chihuahua with the tip of his ax. The two segments peeled apart beautifully, with rococo balance and symmetry.
“Ready,” said the executioner.
“Ready,” said the Captain of the Guards. “I regret all this business, you know.”
“This land is your land,” sang the harp. It had been hidden in the highest tower but the more anyone tried to suppress its sound, the louder it got. From way up there it sounded something like a muezzin. Jack the Greater, being brought out of the cell into the ravishing sunlight, thought glumly that the giant might be able to hear the noise that much the better. But the giant had big thick limbs and he was not much of a self-starter, like Jack the Lesser. It might take a month before the noise penetrated the giant’s thick skull and a thought resulted: I could climb down the beanstalk and get my harp back, and my goose and my pot while I was about it.
“Any last wishes?” asked the Captain of the Guard.
“I should like Bedwad the King to watch the crime he is about to commit upon my person,” said La Tilda. “Also a glass of Dom Basilisk, chilled, with bitters.”
“A kiss from Rotten Ronda,” said Jack the Greater. “And everyone watching. I’ll show you how to grow a stalk, you toadies.”
“Requests denied,” said the Captain. “Mount the scaffolding, please.”
They did. The clouds overhead busied themselves with other matters, to turn the sun’s attention elsewhere, or so Bedwad’s poetic fancy put it, for he was actually watching from behind the drapes in his room. But it wasn’t the clouds, really; it was the huge canopy of green leaves that hung over much of the land now, like a grapevine hanging from an invisible trellis. The leaves shook and the sound of their huge flanks against each other was like the voice of avalanches a valley or two over.
“Fee, fie, foe, fum,” said God.
“I’m having a religious experience, first time in my life,” said La Tilda. “Imagine. Well I suppose it’s to be expected, my deathbed and all. Yes, God?”
“Fee, fie, foe, fum,” said God.
“I know that voice,” said Jack the Greater. “Where have I heard that voice before?”
“Fee, fie, foe, fum,” said God.
“Would make a catchy lyric,” said King Bedwad of Kingland.
“Fee, fie, foe, fum,” said God.
“If that’s God, He’s remarkably one-note about it,” said the Queen Mother.
“Fee, fie, foe, fum,” said God.
“I like a God with a big voice,” said Rotten Ronda, rubbing herself here and there.
“Fee, fie, foe, fum,” said God.
“I like a girl who knows what she likes,” said the Captain of
the Guard, noticing Rotten Ronda for the first time, and smiling at her.
“Fee, fie, foe, fum,” said God.
“I smell the blood of a Kinglishman!” screeched out the Harp. “You fools, run for your lives! Scram, skedaddle, head for the hills! It’s Big Daddy, and he’s no jolly green giant!”
“Fee, fie, foe, fum,” said God, and the ladybugs completed their task as the clocks in the church towers struck four.
Down came the beanstalk, with a sound as of a meteor rucking up angel’s acres of starry meadow. Jack the Lesser looked up and saw the world turn green, and stood back as the stalk danced on its severed stem, and begin to slip sideways.
“I did what I could, Melba,” he said to a ladybug on his nose.
The giant died in the crash, of course, and it took more than a year for the Comrades of Justice to clear away the rotten vegetation. Tourism shrank to an all-time low that year, and the bodies of the King and his Mother were burned in a pyre of peapods.
The singing harp was thrown to the bottom of the sea, where, when the tide was low, it could sometimes be heard chortling chanties or bawdy barroom songs.
By executive fiat of the Prime Executor of State, at the wedding of La Ronda and the Captain the goose that laid the golden eggs was served in a caperberry aspic. The meat of the fowl was stringy and dry and there wasn’t enough to go around.
As for the brothers Jack, they remained in the house with their mother. The magic pot refused to work for its living and would not serve up meals to the newly forming middle class eager to spend disposable income in restaurants. But La Tilda and her boys did not go hungry, and that was something. They always took a special pleasure when the pot decided to surprise them with heaping slabs of succulent goose in caperberry aspic.
The various golden eggs remained in the hands of scoundrels who had lifted them from the Treasury on the day that the Crown collapsed and the People’s Republic of Kingland was formed. No one wanted to admit to having taken part in the looting and the pillage of the Palace, so harboring the egg as a family heirloom became a very private badge of honor.
Many years later, after silent weeks dawdling on her deathbed, La Tilda sat up and told her sons with fiery clarity, “Fee, fie, foe, fum. I have had my vision. The view of the other side is clear to me now. Very soon the first of those golden eggs is going to hatch. And when it does.…”
But she fell back on the sacking that made for her head a rough pillow, and her lads, greater and lesser, had to wait for fate to happen, just like the rest of us.
Gregory Maguire is a novelist who writes for adults and children. Now he lives with his family outside of Boston, Massachusetts, though he has lived in Europe as well. His work for children includes the popular Hamlet Chronicles, the latest installment of which is A Couple of April Fools. For adults, his most recent work is Mirror Mirror. His best-known work, Wicked, is the basis of a recent Broadway musical of the same name. Maguire has published fiction and criticism in Ploughshares, The New York Times Book Review, and other journals. He is also a founder and co-director of Children’s Literature New England, Inc.
His Web site address is www.gregorymaguire.com
Author’s Note:
The appetite to retell stories, to ring changes on them, is a huge and unslakable one. On either side of any story—including the personal narrative of one’s life—looms the uncharted terrain of the unknown. I think that writers revisit favorite material and embellish what the canonical text has reported in order to distract themselves from that urge to see on either side of their own blinkered existence, an urge that can never be satisfied.
Of the story about Jack and the Beanstalk, what always interested me as a child was the notion of how our world would look from the clouds. With such a vantage point—such a camera angle—how much could be seen, how much more could be understood, than we crawling ladybugs on the ground might ever know! The giant, in a sense, had the place usually reserved for an omniscient narrator. From his cloudy terraces he might see and understand everything. Sadly, the giant in the original tale was not known for his curiosity, so he took no pleasure from his vantage point. When I began to write “Fee, Fie, Foe, et Cetera,” I had thought I might take the giant’s point of view. But in fact, omniscient narration takes a little fun out of telling a story. If the giant, with his god’s-eye view, can’t figure out what is going on because he’s too dull to notice or care, perhaps the writer should stay down and crawl with his subjects, too, and find out moment by moment, paragraph by paragraph, how things turn out.
As with my novels Wicked and Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister, I tried to add to the story of Jack and the Beanstalk without contradicting any of the sequence or known characteristics of the original characters. I prefer to add and to embellish rather than to change the template.
Joshua Tree
Emma Bull
My name is Tabetha Sikorsky. Yes, that’s usually spelled“Tabitha,” but spelling has never been my mom’s hot subject. I’m not sure what my dad’s hot subject is, but I hope it’s wood shop, since he’s now living in Phoenix nailing roofing on tract houses.
That beats the hell out of being a manicurist in the middle of the desert in the most horrible town in the world. Which is what my mom is. Which makes me the daughter of a manicurist in the middle of, etc., etc. No comment on where that falls on the beats-the-hell scale.
I’m sixteen. The school district thinks I’m seventeen (when they think of me), because my mother faked my birth certificate to get me into kindergarten when I was four. Kindergarten is free day care. It wasn’t till third grade that I realized my real age wasn’t a secret of Defense Department proportions, and Mom and I wouldn’t go to jail if it came out that she’d forged my birth certificate. But it was still a while before I stopped getting dizzy and sick to my stomach every time someone asked, “And how old are you, sweetie?”
I don’t want anyone to think my mom doesn’t love me. I’ve seen her with people she’s said “I love you” to, and I figure she does a better job of loving me than she does with most of them. She just has a short attention span. I bet I was 24/7 interesting when I was the new Cabbage Patch baby, but now I’m only intermittently riveting. I try not to use it up.
We live in a town that wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for the Marine base. They put military bases in the middle of nowhere because real towns wouldn’t take that crap. In our case, they put the base in the center of hundreds of miles of desert and let a town happen around it, like a parasite. That’s us: Tapewormville.
If you’re just driving through, it probably looks like a thriving little burg. Look! They’ve got a 7-Eleven and a Circle K! If you stay, you have time to notice that the successful businesses deal in the following: barbering (there are more MARINE HAIRCUTS signs in town than stop signs) liquor (drink here, or take-out); fast food (pizza delivery is big); strippers; and auto body shops. The body shops are because, after coming into town to drink and watch girls take off their tops, the Maggots try to drive back to the base. It’s not just an economy, it’s a whole ecosystem.
Not that the only people on base are the Maggots. The officers are mostly older, married with kids, even. Even Marines grow up eventually. Still, it’s like living in an occupied country. I read someplace that people in Guam want the U.S. military base out of there, but they’re afraid the economy would tank. Well, here we are: Guam with no ocean.
Normal towns have plenty of laundromats and supermarkets and clothing stores and stuff. Not base towns. The base has its own washing machines. It has a mess hall and a commissary. Uniforms come with the gig. And for everything else, like videos and cigarettes and magazines that aren’t Soap Opera Digest, there’s the PX. So that leaves the townies’ needs, which can be met by one scabby Wal-Mart twenty miles away.
It’s probably pretty clear that I’m not a base kid. I was born a townie, and I’m scared shitless that I’ll die one. I’m more scared of that than car wrecks, earthquakes, or AIDS. This is the kind o
f town you can’t possibly stay in all your life. So why are there so many people here who’ve done exactly that?
That’s the real reason the town hates the base. On base, people get reassigned, moved around, resign their commissions.
They can leave.
Which raises an interesting question: To get out of this town, do I have to join the Marines?
I’m writing this because Ms. Grammercy gave us an over-the-weekend assignment for Junior English: write our autobiographies. She had to explain to the back of the room what “autobiography” means. Okay, that’s not fair. I already knew, and Maryanne Krassner probably knew, because she reads them if they’re by actors. But I could see the rest of the townies in the back two rows hearing “autobiography” and thinking, “Cars?”
I thought it was a bullshit assignment. We’re in high school. How much autobiography are we supposed to have? But I’ve sort of gotten into it.
To encourage our creativity (she actually said that) Ms. G. gave us a list of questions we could start with. Here they are:
1. What is your name?
2. How old are you?
3. Who are your parents? What do they do?
4. Do you have brothers or sisters?
5. Where were you born? What is your hometown like?
6. What career do you want to pursue?
7. What is your favorite kind of music?
8. What person has had the most influence on your life?
9. What problem in the world is most important to you?
Here’s what I wrote to turn in:
My name is Tabetha Sikorsky. I’m seventeen years old. My mother’s name is Cheryl and she’s a manicurist. My father’s name is Arthur and he does construction in Phoenix. My mother and father are divorced. I don’t have any brothers or sisters. I was born here. It’s small but okay. I would like a career at a store maybe a record store. My favorite music is Eminem. The person who had the most influence on my life was Ms. Keating my 3rd grade teacher because she was smart and still pretty. I think the problem in the world that’s most important to me is pollution.
