karatelobster.com

Jack and the Beanstalk
by Scott Teel

Once there was a boy named Jack who lived with his mother, Jill. Jack’s father had run off with a young fishmonger, so the two lived alone in poverty. They were real poor, even by poor people’s standards. The floor of their house was made of dirt, but Jack’s mother insisted on sweeping, so the house kept getting deeper. They were so poor, they even ate the dirt, so as their house grew deeper, their outhouse grew shallower.

The only possession they had was their milk cow, who provided them with, well, milk, the only sustenance available to them. Other less poor peasants would say to them “Got milk?” and laugh cruelly, never offering them an Oreo to go with it, though many of them raised Oreo trees.

One day, Jack went to milk the old milk cow but only air would come out. And the air didn’t even smell good. So Jack went and told his mom that the cow had gone dry.

“I’m only getting air out of the cow,” he said.

“Oh, Lordy,” Jack’s mother said, “whatever will we do without milk? The only drink the town offers for free is Billy Beer.”

So after much thinking, which was not Jack and Jill’s cup of tea, they decided to try to sell the cow for some money to buy stuff with. Like meat. Of course, they could have just eaten the old cow and saved themselves the trouble, but like I said, they weren’t exactly Biff Einsteins (Biff was Albert’s little-known, dumber brother)..

So, the next day, with tears in his eyes and a baggie of dirt to snack on, Jack set off with the cow toward the town. They walked along with the cow’s bell clanging away, clang, clang, clang, waking up the whole neighborhood, since it was still 5AM. The neighbors threw dirt at him, but he just thanked them and put it in his snack baggie. “Some of these people throw away perfectly good dirt,” Jack thought.

Jack had tears in his eyes because he loved the ol’ milk cow. She’d been there for him for his whole life, providing cow squirtings every day for him. “No amount of money can replace her!” he wept.

So he traded her for a few beans, instead. A man had crossed his path and offered to take the cow in exchange for a few beans, and Jack accepted.

“Don’t you want to know what’s so special about these beans that they’re worth a whole cow?” asked the man.

“Nah,” said Jack. “Whatever.”

“These are magic beans!” the man said. “Once planted, they—“

“I SAID ‘whatever’ okay? You made the sale, quit pandering, it makes you look like a fool.”

Jack returned home and went into his little house, where his mother sat, knitting a sweater out of caterpillar hair, which was all they could get.

“Well?” she cried when he entered, “how much did you get? Huh? Can we afford the jukebox I’ve wanted for so long?”

“You’ll be pleased to see that I got…these for her!” he said, and he whipped out the beans. Now, Jill wasn’t bright, but it was at this time that she realized her son was about as smart as a box of hair.

“Beans? Beans for a whole cow? What, did you fall out of the stupid tree and hit every branch on the way down?”

“Uh-oh,” thought Jack, “think, think, how can you convince her it wasn’t a dumb move…” Then he remembered what the man had said.

“But mother! These are magic beans! Once planted, they…do…stuff. Magic stuff.”

“Well, la-de da,” said his mom. “You go ahead and plant ‘em if you want, but use your own dirt, I’m not missing a meal for those beans.”

Jack went out and planted the seeds and watered them, and went to bed, because there wasn’t much else to do around there, unless you liked manure kicking, which he didn’t anymore, since it reminded him of his old milk cow. He slept the night away, dreaming of the little bean plant that would grow, and when he went to check on the beans the next morning, a humongous beanstalk had grown, going all the way up into the clouds.

“How the hell am I supposed to pick beans from way up there?” Jack said. “This was a total rip-off.”

Then he thought, if I take a basket with me, I can carry the beans down! It was his first genuine idea, but it wasn’t much of one, because he soon remembered he was too poor to own a basket.

“Well, that’s it,” he thought. “I’ll climb the beanstalk anyway, maybe I’ll be lucky and fall off and die.”

So he began climbing, up, up, up, higher and higher. As he got higher, he looked down. “Hey, I can see my house from here!” he said. Of course, he could see his house on the ground as well, so it was less thrilling than one might think.

Eventually, after a long, long climb, he reached the clouds, and climbing up through them, he discovered a castle atop the clouds, a giant castle. “Why would anyone need a castle that big?” he asked out loud, not even questioning what a castle was doing on a cloud. He hopped onto the cloud and made his way to the castle, walking right in since the gate was so big he could fit right through the spaces. The giant who owned the castle had the CIA and the FBI maintaining the security of the castle, so Jack easily walked right in undetected.

Inside, the castle was lavishly decorated with opulence. You couldn’t spit in here without hitting some opulence, and if you did spit in here, the spit would immediately become opulent. There were riches and foodstuffs everywhere. Cheeses, fruits, chocolates, goblets filled with goblet juice, cereal, meats, caviar, Saltines, Oreo trees, those little tiny carrots, everything you could think of. Yogurt. Hummus. How all this stuff was delivered to a cloud is beyond me, but it was there. And in the corner, in a little nest, sat a little goose. Jack watched as the goose let out a honk and plop! Out came a golden egg.

“Those eggs would make Easter so much easier,” thought Jack. “You wouldn’t need to color them at all!” So Jack went over toward the goose, but before he got there, a giant came into the room and went straight for the pork rinds, and Jack hid behind a giant pair of tighty-whities that were lying on the floor. Before he reached the rinds, the giant stopped and sniffed the air.

“Fe-fi-fo-fum,” he said. “I smell the blood of an Englishman!”

Jack was, in fact, an Englishman, and wondered how the giant could smell his blood. I mean, it was inside his body, which he rarely washed, and he was hiding in a used pair of stinky undies.

“Ha ha!” the giant bellowed. “I just like saying that. I can’t smell a damn thing.”

He went over to the goose, which was teeny to him. “Lay some gold on me baby,” he said. And the goose squeezed hard and plop! Out came another golden egg. The giant took the egg and put it in his pocket. “This little eggy will pay for our membership to Costco.”

“Hey,” thought Jack. “He’s right. Gold can be used to purchase other items, though it’s clearly only a yellow metal, and not a very hard or useful one at that. Why, with that goose, mother and I could be dining on the finest topsoil!”

The giant sat to his meal, and Jack ran over to the goose. “Be very quiet,” he said, “I’m just abducting you and taking you away from a life of luxury to live in my pitiful hovel.” So the goose, no dummy, started honking away, and Jack had to grab her and run.

The giant heard the honking and got up and looked for his goose, but his goose was gone. Someone had gotten his goose.

Jack was running as fast as his little legs could carry him, but the door was closed now! He’d have to run under the door to get out, but that would be close. The goose was even taller than he, with him holding it and all. As they reached the door, Jack yelled “Duck! Duck Goose!” and he and the goose zipped under the door and out.

The giant was really perturbed. He had to find the key to open the door, and while he was doing that, Jack was running toward the vine, which was not easy, if you’ve ever tried to run on a cloud, you know, it’s just water vapor after all.

Jack reached the vine and started clambering down with the goose, and that was a challenge, because the goose kept pecking him in the privates. “Stop pecking my privates, please!” Jack kept saying to the goose, who continued to peck him.

Jack was almost to the ground when he looked up. The giant was starting to climb down the vine after him. He really liked that goose. When Jack got to the ground, he tossed the goose to his mother and yelled to her “Get me an axe!”

“I’ll take care of it!” she yelled, and picked up the axe from the chopping block, plopped the goose down there and whacked its head off with one chop.

“What the hell are you doing!?” Jack screamed. “It laid golden eggs!”

“Right,” his mom said. “And there are giants living in the clouds, you’ll tell me next. Let’s gut this baby and chow out.”

And in the house she went, already pulling feathers off the goose. Jack looked up and saw the giant coming down fast! Jack grabbed the axe and started chopping the vine.

“Hey, don’t do that!” the giant yelled. “I might fall and kill myself! Oh wait, you want that. I forgot. Carry on.”

With one last whack, the vine snapped, and the giant came tumbling down.

And Jack realized he was right under the falling giant.

He tried to run, but it was too late, the giant landed on him and all that was left of Jack was a soft squishing noise.

Jack’s mother ate the goose that night and choked to death on a little gold nugget forming inside it. The old cow, it turned out, just had a cold, and after a few days of rest, she started giving gold milk, which was really ironic.

The Moral of the Story Is: Geese that lay precious metals for giants in the clouds are just trouble, man.