Jack and the Beanstalk: A retelling of Jack and the Beanstalk taking inspiration from Jack and the Beanstalk while also being influenced by Jack and the Beanstalk. [Current]

A retelling, huh? That almost got a chuckle out of me. Whoever wrote that must have been using the word in the loosest sense.

I don’t know which version of Jack and the Beanstalk they’d read, but I couldn’t remember one where Jack wakes up in a crater while there are giants around picking men from trees like fruit. Must have been the part that happens offscreen, I guess.

Putting that aside, I let loose a sigh that bordered on being a shout, then ordered my page to display my relations.

Stories, traits, abilities, and possessions faded away to make space for what I requested. At the top right corner of what was freshly vacated, a yet to be seen entry took root.

Pillaging Giants [Enemies]

Well, that explained me getting pissed just looking at them.

Anything else? I asked in a thought. In response, the page produced a name and two placeholders for the three giants. There was the Grey Giant, Orange Giant #1, and Og.

Rather than names, I was hoping for a little more information on our relationship, but I suppose beggars can’t be choosers.

After skipping over an entry for a Nameless Cat, the next entry was for my family. I opened it up…

— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —

Mother [Agatha]

Father [Grant] (Deceased)

Andrew [Brother] (Deceased)

Jane [Sister] (Deceased)

Timothy [Brother] (Deceased)

— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —

Whole lot of dead family… They weren’t my family—none of the names matched and I didn’t have any younger siblings—but just like seeing the familiar stranger hung dead by the giant’s hand, seeing that hurt.

Apparently, the field hands working for the other Jack’s father had it even worse. Didn’t even have to open their listing to check when the whole group was labeled [Dead].

Thankfully, other than those two groups, most everyone this Jack knew was still alive. Knowing that wasn’t going to be much helpful for the moment, but it was comforting to know that I wasn’t alone in the world.

With a thought, my relations faded away leaving the page blank. Nothing took its place.

A map, a quest, food, shelter, water, instructions, directions—it didn’t matter what I tried, the page wouldn’t show me anything beyond what belonged to the categories it had originally listed. After wasting a couple minutes trying, I gave up and pocketed my page.

Getting up, I looked to the top of the tree. If the page wasn’t going to guide me, then I’d have to find what I needed on my own.

Using my new monkey man climbing abilities, I scaled the upper half of the tree. Since the one I was on wasn’t the tallest of its neighbors, I skipped branches to the one that was once I got near the top.

Arriving at the sharp end of the tallest tree of the bunch, I could see... nothing. In every direction I was surrounded by a sea of green-tipped thorns spanning to the edge of the horizon. Up there, I was as lost as I was back on the ground.

It was a beautiful view, though, and I was able to guess the time—somewhere between the late morning and the early afternoon—from the position of the sun. I would have stayed up there gazing for a while longer if I knew whether or not they had giant sky birds ready to eat people around here.

Once I got my boots back on the ground, I spared the other Jack’s grave a glance. My last memory before waking up in the forest was me getting hit by a truck. Put that together with me waking up next to an axe and a me-sized hole and it got me thinking that I’d been kidnapped by a serial killer.

Anyways, I ditched the grave and headed over to the tree that the dead man’s corpse had been hanging from. There was a chance something useful might have been left behind, so I wanted to check.

Except for a piece of cloth that had probably been torn off when Og pulled the corpse from the tree, there wasn’t anything else I found when I climbed up there. On the ground below, however, I did find a pouch, freshly stained. It stored a little more than a handful of green beans, half of which were smashed.

Magic Beans, perhaps? Despite the changes, this was still Jack and the Beanstalk, after all.

For now, there was no way for me to check unless...

I pulled out my page and had it display my possessions. Without prompt, it had already created an entry for the beans and labeled them the Dead Man’s Beans.

Other than giving me something to call them and a count of how many were still intact, however, the page described nothing about the beans I hadn’t already figured out just by looking in the pouch.

Well, at least it had given me something.

Back into my pocket the page went and I tied the beans to my belt. With my dead man’s treasures secured, I walked over to the path the giants had taken and took a good look.

Where they had walked, the trees had been planted just wide enough for a pair of horses to travel comfortably. That definitely wasn’t wide enough for two giants and since the giants—judging by the tracks—had walked both ways up and down the path, there was some overlap of their footprints going in opposite directions.

As for the quality of the path, all that stomping the giants did certainly hadn’t helped it. From the tracks left behind, it looked like the livestock had been walking on dirt, while the giants had been trekking it in mud.

In other words, they had made quite the mess. But switching focus from the giants’ tracks onto the animals’, it looked like the livestock only had tracks coming from one way.

I somehow doubted that these giants were farmers, so that meant there was a good chance of civilization being down the way the livestock had come from. And since that was also the opposite direction the giants were currently traveling, I decided to head that way.

Following the path, but never daring to set a single foot on it, I retraced the giants’ steps. For all I knew, the giants would come back around, then track me down if I mixed my footprints in with their own. And if not, there was still the danger of lookouts—human or giant—along the way.

With those scenarios and more being possible, I thought it’d be safer to walk between the trees just a little ways off the path.

I’m guessing here, but after about fifteen minutes spent shadowing the path, I came to a point where the giant tracks split. There was one set of tracks that continued down the path and a more disorganized—likely due to the densely packed trees—set that was almost perpendicular to the original.

Not too far off, the trees looked like they ended after a certain point down the way that broke off from the path, so I switched to following the set of tracks going that way.

As I approached where the trees cut off, it became obvious that I was heading towards a clearing. I picked up pace towards that opening in the forest, but stopped when I heard a muffled sob. Someone was crying up ahead.

Just as I had done when the giants were approaching, I climbed up the nearest tree. Unlike last time where I set up camp, however, I started hopping branches towards the clearing so I could get in range for a better view. If I ended up seeing someone who needed help down there--and there was a chance they’d end up helping me back—I wasn't against the idea of helping them.

That being said, for me it was safety first. If I spotted a giant down there, I wasn't about to be helping anybody. Especially not after seeing one of them drop a grown man into a sack.

I continued my ninja act up until I reached the clearing's edge. On the way there, I hadn't exactly been the quietest, but considering how high up I was, I didn't think a giant could get me without throwing something. Besides, I hadn't exactly been feeling the earth quake since the grey and the orange ones passed me by so I was probably fine.

Peeking into the clearing from around a tree, I saw a two-story house with a barn to its side and a few fields laid out in front of it. The clearing would have been a tight fit for a village and its fields, but since there was only one property, it was quite spacious. That's about all the positive things I could say about the place after the giants had their way with it.

In the second story of the house, there was a hole almost big enough for one of the fat giants to fit through. And speaking of them, it looked like one of them had split the barn in half à la body slam.

The fields had been gouged and trampled and as for the rest of the property, there were pits and puddles of what looked like oil scattered all over the place.

All of that went along with the scattered corpses, of course. I counted six from where I was standing, but if the dead man hanging in the tree from earlier was anything to go by, there were probably some missing.

And then came those muffled cries. I could see where they were coming from now. Sitting on the tracks the giants had laid when they came to destroy this place, there was a woman. In her arms, she held a seventh corpse whose chest she’d buried her head in.

After spotting her, I climbed down and made my approach. It probably wasn’t the safest thing to do in a magic world where I didn’t know if witches, shapeshifters, and angry spirits existed, but she had looked so familiar.

I’ll add that according to my page, the other Jack only had one family member left. I knew which one it was and I was thinking it was her.

About fifteen paces short of her, I stopped and stood silent. If she had heard my approach, she made no attempt to make that known to me.

I must have been standing there for a whole minute just listening to her sobbing before I decided to say something. But when I tried speaking, I got choked up. It took a bit of a struggle, but I got it.

“Mom?” I asked. Saying it made me feel like throwing up. It sounded right, but it definitely felt wrong.

After I called out to her, the woman’s whimpers came to a sudden halt and she became like a statue. We shared our next minute together in silence.

"Jack?" She finally asked. She peeked over her shoulder. From the way she had asked it, it sounded like she was having trouble believing I could even be there.

I hesitated for a second, before lying again. “Mom?” I wanted to vomit.

“Jack.” She said. Her voice was fleeting.

“What happened?” I asked her. According to the page, her name was Agatha.

She didn’t answer. Her focus was on the corpse held within her arms. She laid the dead man down gently before getting up and turning to me. Once she was up, she ran towards me.

“Jack.” Or at least she would have if grief hadn’t made her so weak.

“Jack.” I met her halfway. She wrapped her arms around me and laid her head upon my chest.

“Jack,” her breath became ragged as her tears were born anew, “I thought I lost you.”

Just like calling her my mother had made me feel awful, so did this. But from that, I understood why.

The other Jack had loved his mother. Even now, through his lingering feelings, I could feel that emotion. And because of that love, what was left of him couldn’t stand what I was doing.

The son that this woman loved was dead and here I was impersonating him. I was taking advantage of the mother he loved and because I inherited his feelings I hated myself for doing so.

But even though I hated myself for it, I couldn’t afford to stop. I wrapped my arms around the other Jack’s mother and said, “I thought I lost you too.”

Tears flowed from my eyes. Not for anything she or I had said, but for what we had lost.

And while we wept, there were no more words to be said, we just stood there holding each other. Even after our tears had stopped, even after Agatha had calmed herself, we still held each other.