Myth and Magic

by Radclyffe

  And Adalbert and the mage’s apprentice lived happily ever after.

  Clifford Henderson (cliffordhenderson.net) is the author of three award-winning novels. Her fourth, Rest Home Runaways, was released in August 2014. When not writing, Clifford and her partner of twenty years run the Fun Institute, a school of improv and solo performance.

  This story is based on “Jack and the Beanstalk.”

  Beanstalk

  Clifford Henderson

  Once upon the future, in a town called Utonia, there was a strikingly handsome, but seriously unhappy, young woman named Jackie. It was unusual for Utonians to be unhappy because most of them were very happy, or if not very happy, at least relatively content. And why wouldn’t they be? Utonia was a beautiful town. It rested between two plump mountains and had soil so fertile, it was said if you weren’t careful the seed in your pocket might take root. So everyone was well fed and strong and generally stayed that way until they dropped dead, at which point there was much crying and singing and gratefulness for having known the deceased. But mostly the people were happy and even when they weren’t they moved through their unhappiness quickly, never thinking to hang on to grudges or grievances.

  You might wonder why Jackie was so unhappy. After all, she had a strong body and a wonderful mop of curly, bronze hair, green eyes that shone like peridot cabochons, and a mind quick as light. What’s more, she lived and worked in an elegant, arty little studio, which she paid for with the sales of her stunning 3-D landscapes, each one its own liquid crystal display that changed with the seasons. But while others thought her landscapes dazzling and extravagant, the edges of these masterpieces depressed her, made her feel hemmed in. At the start of each new landscape she would brace herself for its eventual disappointment.

  The Utonians did not know what to make of her predilection for gloominess, but then Utonians, on the whole, were a little unclear about unhappiness—what caused it and such—but they were great believers in the power of love. They didn’t much care who loved whom, some women loved women, some loved men; some men loved men, some women, it was all the same to them. Indeed, parents noted their children’s gender preferences in the same light as they might note their eye and hair color. Love was simply love and it was good. Consequently, some speculated that Jackie’s unhappiness was caused by a lack of love. Others disputed it. She’d had lovers before, after all, some of the most beautiful women in Utonia. Shouldn’t that have cured her? In the end, none could come up with a definite cause. None, that is, except for the crone, Marta, who lived by herself in a hovel made of bones, clay, and hide. She was an ornery spit of a woman who, it was understood, was happiest when left alone with her garden of cabbages, beans, and carrots. She was also the only one old enough to remember how things used to be. And she understood exactly the cause of Jackie’s unhappiness.

  It was no surprise then that when Jackie was walking to the gallery one day, her most recent landscape tucked under her arm, she bumped right into Marta, because solutions are forever seeking out problems. Sadly, it takes a quick wit and cleverness to knit the two together, and while quite clever, Jackie was not clever enough to recognize her deliverance.

  “Watch where you’re going!” Marta said.

  Startled, Jackie looked up from a smattering of withered bougainvillea petals on the ground. “Oh, Marta! I didn’t see you.”

  “Of course you didn’t. You were too busy staring at your feet.”

  “I was looking at these petals. I—”

  “I know what you were doing, girl.”

  Jackie, like all Utonians, was slightly frightened by Marta. The stench of less-happy times hovered around her, an ominous fog of what could be if one weren’t mindful.

  “Poor, poor me,” the crone taunted. “That’s what you were thinking, wasn’t it? Poor, poor me. That’s what keeps you from looking where you are going.”

  “Well, I…” But Jackie could not find it inside herself to admit that what Marta said was true, that she was feeling particularly low. While the world she lived in did not have “edges” the way her landscapes did, it felt as if it did. Utonia was too small, too predictable, too conventional. Where was the challenge?

  “What’s that under your arm?” Marta asked, pointing to the landscape.

  “One of my landscapes. I’m taking it to the gallery.”

  “Let me have a look at it.”

  Jackie held it out for Marta’s inspection. The landscape was one of her Foggy Morning series, an 18” x 24” rendering of a willow tree by a stream.

  Frowning, Marta turned her head from side to side as if to get a better angle, then said, “Flip it upside down.” Which Jackie did, although she felt insulted that the old woman was treating her artwork as if it were the ugliest thing she’d ever seen. After viewing it upside down and then right side up again, Marta said, “I’ll take it!” and snatched it from Jackie’s grasp.

  Jackie did not want to sell it to the crone, figuring it would be tossed and forgotten among her notorious collection of bones and skins, but there was no arguing with Marta, so she agreed to the sale, but before she had a chance to name her price, Marta handed her a large speckled bean.

  “What’s this?” Jackie said.

  “Payment,” Marta said.

  “But it’s a bean. What am I supposed to do with a bean?”

  “If you have any sense at all, you’ll plant it.” With that Marta began hobbling up to her hovel on the hill, robbing Jackie of the chance to quarrel.

  Not that she would have. Quarreling with Marta simply wasn’t done. The many tales of her turning people into worms and lizards made it inadvisable. Jackie didn’t need the money anyway. Her landscapes made her a comfortable living. She only placed them into the gallery to keep them from collecting cobwebs. So, dispirited, but not much more than usual, Jackie slogged back to her studio. Once there, she had just enough energy to curse Marta’s meager payment and toss the stupid pink and black bean between two prickly thistles in the weedy plot in front of her house. She then dragged her sorry self inside and flopped down on the daybed, her final thought before nodding off that she might get lucky and actually die in her sleep from boredom.

  The next morning she slept in, not realizing how late it was because her studio, oddly, was still dark. Lying on her daybed, rubbing out a crick in her neck, she heard an eerie humming coming from outside. Yawning, she stumbled over to the window and was shocked to see a huge, fibrous stalk with plate-sized, heart-shaped leaves coiling up and up, like a corkscrew, from between the two thistles in her weedy plot. As she was staring, her mouth agape, a scarlet flower bloomed from the stalk. Then another. And another. One on top of the next. What the hell? she thought. Then she remembered Marta’s bean. Clearly, it had been no ordinary bean. It was bewitched! She should have known.

  She slipped on her slacks and tee, slid on a pair of sandals, and charged outside, her curiosity piqued. The beanstalk spiraled upward past the house, past the trees, and was just breaking into the clouds—piercing the edges of her world! Marta had made her wish come true!

  Jackie grabbed a hold of the beanstalk, wedged her foot into the axil where leaf met stalk, and tested to see if the stem would hold her weight. It did! She tried the next one up. This too held her weight. Impulsively, she began climbing, stopping only to catch her breath. The growing stalk aided in propelling her upward like an escalator. She couldn’t wait to see what lay ahead, knew it must be wonderful. Why else would Marta have given her the bean? Happier than she’d felt in years, she began to sing a childhood ditty as she climbed, never once looking back at Utonia, now little more than a speck in the distance.

  When she reached the clouds she started having reservations. It was cold for one thing, and disorienting, the puffy whiteness making her lose her equilibrium—both physically and mentally. What if Marta doesn’t have my best interests in mind? What if Marta is sending me to a place from which I can’t return—to rid Utonia of my gloominess? But she couldn’t stop now—n
ot so close to learning what was beyond the edges. So, like a little goat, she continued on.

  Having made it through the clouds, she was rewarded to find the stalk curling up through a tunnel of solid earth toward a patch of blue sky. She scrabbled up through the wormy earth and hauled herself up onto the land into a wonderfully warm, sunny day and a long dirt road that appeared to lead to some sort of distant city. She could just make out a jagged skyline of enormous, erect buildings, each one taller than the next.

  Jackie did not stop to think what kind of a self-important place would encourage such ostentatious architecture. Oh no. She imagined it to be better than any she’d ever seen, the buildings filled with beings much more technically advanced than Utonians, much more complicated and interesting. What a ninny she’d been for doubting Marta! Clearly, the crone had only her best interests in mind.

  She trotted toward the city, passing through grassy hills dotted with oversized cows and sheep. She passed farms and ranches, the houses and barns perpendicular and huge, in strange contrast to the soft, undulating landscape.

  She spotted a shepherd trying to coax a wayward sheep out of a gulch. A pimply teenager, he was close to twelve feet tall!

  “Hello!” Jackie yelled.

  He looked up from his charge, gave Jackie the once-over, and yelled, “What’s wrong with you?”

  This took her aback. “Wrong?”

  “You’re so small.”

  She laughed. “Oh. That. Where I come from we’re all this size. Or thereabout.”

  “Is your husband tiny too?”

  “My husband?”

  “Yeah. You know, the guy you’re joined to.”

  “Actually, I don’t have a husband.”

  “Sorry to hear that,” he said, shaking his head. “At your age.”

  She chose to ignore his rudeness. “What’s this city up ahead?”

  “Pureland. Where every man is happy and every dream fulfilled.”

  Excited, she said, “Thanks!” and continued on her way, unmindful of the bitter tone with which he’d uttered these last words.

  Soon other people joined her on the road, peasants mostly, filing out of their giant farmhouses and heading toward the city, all of them dressed in what looked to be their finest clothes, all of them walking with a steadfast urgency. They were huge, some of them as tall as sixteen feet, but unlike in Utonia, where there was no dress code, where a person wore what she or he felt best reflected his or her personality—skirt, sarong, slacks, tunic, gown, or suit—the women here all wore coarse ankle-length dresses; the men, simple slacks and tunics. Most would not look at her. Those who did, did so with pity. She spotted a boy, about her size, struggling along behind his parents on painful-looking stilts. He glanced at her briefly then looked away, clearly ashamed to be associated with someone of her diminutive stature. But she didn’t give much thought to the Purelanders’ obvious discomfort with her size, reasoning that if any of them set foot in Utonia, people would stare too. Besides, up ahead a phalanx of young giantesses decked out in flowers and long white dresses paraded with great importance. Clearly the crowd was heading to some kind of special event. It had now grown so large it was more or less pushing her along.

  They arrived in what appeared to be a suburb of the gleaming city. Giant houses with giant lawns and giant birdbaths and decorative gnomes lined the road with military precision. But it was the people streaming out of these houses that fascinated Jackie. Not only were they huge like the peasants, but they were also dripping wealth.

  The giant women clung to their giant men’s arms like pocketbooks, their faces masked in self-righteousness. They wore opulent ankle-length dresses so snug they were forced to take tiny steps—two or three high-heeled ones to every leather-booted one of the male—and they were draped in so many jewels they had trouble lifting their arms or turning quickly. As for the men, they strode down the streets in tight slacks featuring huge jeweled cups covering their genitals. Men and women alike held their chins so high and their chests so puffed out they never even saw Jackie trolling around beneath them. Or, more likely, they simply had no interest.

  Then, amid the bustle and hubbub, Jackie heard someone weeping. Drawn to the sadness like moisture to the earth, she angled her way out of the crowd, waited until the street emptied of people, and made her way to the nearby house that seemed its source. She had to climb a spiky shrub to see inside the first-story window. But it was worth it, for there, sobbing underneath a waterfall of silky black hair, was a young woman not much bigger than Jackie. She was slumped over on a bed much too large for her and was brimming with a sorrow so deep if flowers had been in the room they surely would have wilted in empathy. Jackie could not turn away. Even when a fat giantess burst into the room.

  The giantess was squeezed into a shiny pink dress and teetered on ridiculously high-heeled shoes. Her expression was twisted with rage. “I am so ashamed of you, Ivy! Twenty-two years old and still not married!”

  A balding giant with large muscles and a huge gut was hot on her heels. “It’s because she’s a runt! What man would want her?”

  “I had the Ragner boy all lined up!” A boil the size of a ripe plum bobbed on the giantess’s upper lip as she spewed the ugly words. “He was ready to take her. But what did she go and do? She told him she didn’t want to marry him. Told him she would make a terrible wife! Honestly! The girl doesn’t know what’s good for her!”

  The giant slammed out of the room, yelling, “I’m going to the Joining Ceremony! And you’d best come with me, Wife! Or people will talk.”

  “What about her?” the wife wailed.

  “Let her stew in her tears. Maybe she’ll cry herself into some sense.”

  The giantess sighed a sigh so long and so suffering the pictures on the bedroom wall rattled. “I’ll tell people you’re sick. That should keep them from coming after you. But you miss too many Joining Ceremonies and they’re going to wonder.”

  The young woman, Ivy, lifted her head, revealing a beauty not even anger or the puffy redness of crying could mask. “I hate Joining Ceremonies! Half the couples getting joined are miserable!”

  “Miserable beats alone!” the giantess said before storming out of the room.

  Jackie longed to comfort the young woman, Ivy. Ivy! The name alone caused a curious feeling to rise up in her, a feeling of possibility, a feeling that maybe she could be happy—if only she could find a way to make contact. A gentle knock on the window? No. It would scare her; perhaps make her call out to her awful parents. Besides, there was such pleasure in simply gazing at her: her strong cheekbones, her long lashes, her lovely, full lips…

  “What are you doing peering into Jorge Ingers’s house?” a hulking giant snarled from the street.

  Terrified, Jackie leapt down from her perch and sprinted her way down the street and through the crisscrossing avenues of the suburb, never daring to look over her shoulder to see if anyone was following. She continued on through the rolling green hills, her adrenaline pumping, heart thumping, and when she finally reached the hole in the road, she dove into the tunnel and all but slid her way down to the weedy patch in front of her house. Only then did she let herself rest, slumped on the ground, winded and exhilarated. What an adventure she’d had! What a peek into another world!

  That night she was unable to sleep. She couldn’t stop thinking about Ivy, about how sad she was. She became so obsessed with ways she herself might alleviate Ivy’s unhappiness that she forgot all about her own discontent. She kept getting out of bed to look out the window at the beanstalk. Radiant with moonlight, the heart-shaped leaves glowed from within while the stalk lay hidden within the shadows. She cursed the lazy sun for taking its sweet time rising, cursed herself for being such a coward she’d scurried home at the first sign of trouble.

  She picked up her palm communicator and messaged Marta. What kind of bean was that?

  She was surprised when Marta messaged her right back. It was the dead of night. You needed perspective
.

  Irritated by Marta’s elusiveness, Jackie messaged back a line of angry question marks.

  Good luck with the bean was all Marta replied.

  Jackie tossed her communicator onto the daybed and continued her pacing and sitting and pacing and cursing until dawn finally had the decency to break. Then she strode outside to the weedy patch, prepared to climb up the beanstalk, only to discover it had sprouted beans! Big beautiful green pods clung to the stalk like giant dewdrops. The beans made the stalk much easier to climb. She could use the pods to hoist herself up. When she reached the road this time, she took it at a quick clip, her mind whirring with scenarios of what she would say, or do, when she saw Ivy again.

  The shepherd startled her out of her scheming. “Hey, Shortie! Where are you off to in such a hurry?”

  “To seek out a friend!” she yelled back.

  He waved a hand in the air. “Good luck!”

  She continued jogging through the hills until she reached the suburb of oversized houses where she shifted to a brisk walk so as not to gain the attention of the giant passersby. When, at last, she came to that same street corner and that same shrub, she had to wait for a giantess pushing an enormous stroller with a pig-faced baby to make her way down the street before climbing up to the window.

  Once there, she held her breath and peered into the room. Ivy was there! Sitting on the floor drawing in what looked to be a giant’s notepad. She was even more beautiful than Jackie remembered, her black hair now tucked behind the cutest of ears. But once again Jackie was at a loss for how to get her attention. She’d spent the entire night coming up with plans for what she would do when she saw Ivy again, and now she couldn’t think of a single one. If she could just get up the nerve to knock, she could—