BEANSTALK and other shorts

Beanstalk

It doesn’t seem like a fairy tale at first. Just one of those out-of-the-way places that modern people like to retreat to, telling themselves they will be happier with a simple life. You know how it goes. Of course, you must add electricity to the cottage, and the plumbing must come up to par, trash service be arranged, and soon antenna and cable, and you add a breakfast nook, maybe a game room, and a garage for the motorcycle, which then must be upgraded to a used car, and then to a new car…and pretty soon you are living hunched over your computer keyboard in a circle of dim lamplight, just like you did in the city. You no longer notice the hollyhocks in the garden, or the shaggy green hills with surprising paths; you forget to feed the chickens and they go wild, eating bugs and not producing eggs any more; the tomato vine dries up and dies. You are back in a city apartment, except that it’s connected by a very long umbilical cord to the nearest skyscraper.

            But this is the remote countryside after all, and one day something grubby and unsociable chews through your lines and the power goes out. You suddenly notice how depressing the cottage is, and in the end you are forced outside.

            It is then you finally see the beanstalk. It has grown back up the hills and into the sky while you were ignoring it. And even to a pedestrian soul like yours, it holds a fathomless allure. What is it DOING, going into the sky like that? How can it hang on nothing? Or is it hooked to something up there? It’s a long afternoon with nothing to do but wait for the PG&E truck, and before you know it you have pulled out your old rock climbing gear and started grubbing your way into the sky on that hairy green vine.

            It’s only when you get to the top that you understand. Because there is the giant’s castle, and the big poultry pen, and the million rooms of dust and broken things that Jack left behind. There are bones here, bones of giant birds; and masses of grain sprouting into a stench of tangled grasses. A cow as large as a freeway that died with its udders distended, moaning to be milked. A closet of mysterious implements, clearly magical, that no one now can lift, much less use. And you think of Jack, stealing that goose for its easy gold; of the hapless giant plunging to its death; and how there is nothing but an enormous hole in the valley, no magic but electricity, nothing in the clouds but an empty pantry.

            And your throat aches and closes up. Maybe you cry. For yourself, for the giant, and for the simple life you are unable to live.