There was once a young woman named
Misandra whose mother pressured her incessantly to marry. Disinclined to inherit any domestic work, she
held off for a couple years. She got her
PhD in psychology and became a university professor, advising her students to
put education and pride before men. But
her mother’s probing grew worse and worse, and she could stand it no
longer. So Misandra decided to pursue
the only man she knew to be unspoken for: Ken Dryfus, the Medieval Studies
professor.
Ken never cared much for the modern day,
but he did long for a woman, for every good Middle Aged man had one. As Misandra took her best shot at flirting,
Ken jumped at the chance to live a life that Geoffrey Chaucer would have,
maybe, been proud of.
After years of not paying much mind to each
other, Misandra and Ken eventually found it proper to have a child. They didn’t have the most impressive genes,
but they weren’t bad. Decades of
impertinence and antediluvian fantasies surely took their toll on them. Following twenty months of pregnancy,
Misandra gave birth to a baby ogre whom she called Pip.
Despite his tiny name, Pip Dryfus grew to
an imposing height of twelve feet high and five feet wide by the age of
ten. But this wasn’t due to bountiful
nurturing. Pip’s mother and father were
always too busy teaching and making political statements to look after their
little ogre. So Pip quickly learned to
fend for himself and even took on a job stocking shelves at Poppers, the local
grocer. After months of being assigned
to Aisle 12, Pip found something out of place.
Betwixt the Lima and kidney beans, he felt an odd hybrid—somewhat like
himself. Pip wondered what a velvet bag
of loose beans was doing next to the merchandise, but he figured some crazy kid
just threw them up there to tease his little brother. He took them to the lost-and-found, hoping
the poor child would recover his strange possession.
In the meantime, Pip was accepted to his
parents’ alma mater and started his own business, revolutionizing the way
grocery store aisles were organized, no velvety bags of beans to be found. To accommodate the shorter people in his
life, he even designed a series of staggered ladders to reach every shelf of
every aisle, all the way up to the ceiling.
Pip became the CEO of Poppers, immediately rewarded by his inventiveness
and leadership.
Far removed from his stock boy days, a
twenty-two-year-old Pip decided to check out the old storage unit where he used
to spend many a day eating bologna sandwiches and cutting sheepskin parchment
for his dad’s latest manuscripts. Pip
was astonished to find that the velvet bag of beans was the only item left in
the lost-and-found, sitting squarely in the middle of the box. Seeing that it had been seven years since he
had put them there, he figured it was about time to claim them himself.
Once Pip came home, he inspected the beans
and quickly found them impractical for typical use. Too rough to eat, too hard to cook, and too
unsightly to put on display—again, much like Pip—the beans could potentially
serve one last purpose in the garden. So
he planted two out of the five beans, not expecting a whole lot to come of it.
Much to Pip’s surprise, the beans grew
into an incredible beanstalk by the next morning, reaching higher than the
clouds above. Not once encountering a
plant taller than him, Pip was curious to see how high it actually went, and
promptly climbed to the top. Astonished
to be far above the clouds, Pip noticed an empty lot, filled with grass and
trees and various creatures. Although
Pip wasn’t the deforesting sort, he felt that this land was prime for
development, and because it wasn’t on the ground, so to speak, he didn’t feel
too bad about it.
With the grand sums of money he made from
Poppers, Pip was able to start his own construction company, hiring some old
buddies from his shelf-stocking days. In
a matter of weeks, Pip and his friends had built a road with four houses on
each side, Pip’s being the first one on the left. Now all he needed was a wife. Because Pip had only brought men to his new
home, this task would have to be accomplished down below.
Before that, however, Pip thought it best
to settle into sky life. None of his colleagues
stayed long, precisely because the prospects of finding a mate up there were so
low. Poor Pip was so attached to his new
development that he couldn’t bare to let it waste away with no one tending to it.
So for a decade Pip stayed high above the
rest, breeding animals, building instruments, and counting his gold. Pip had become increasingly greedy in his
solitude, resolving to produce for his world only items that could make him
lots of money and save him lots of time.
He soon uncovered enough magic soil to produce a hen that lays golden
eggs and a melodic talking harp.
He had also grown increasingly
anti-social, talking only with his magical harp on occasion. Pip no longer found it efficient to speak in
full sentences, so he reduced himself to short phrases, words, and vowels. What’s more, his animals had become
overpopulated and subsequently started dying off. Pip craved forbidden meat.
So accustomed to his utopia, Pip found it
hard to pry himself away for more food and a wife, at long last. No neighbors for miles at his Earth home, Pip
never had to worry about anyone discovering his secret place, but he didn’t
want to continue taking that chance. He
decided that after he met a woman, he would chop the beanstalk.
Missing for ten years, Pip realized that
his dad had put up posters all around town, offering a $10,000 reward for his
safe return. Even though Pip was in his
early thirties at this point, his father didn’t forget about him.
But Pip didn’t think about his parents at
all when he reached the ground—all he wanted was food and a wife. He found both at Poppers, on the now-abandoned
Main Street.
Manning the deli counter at that time was
Gwendela, an extremely tall and lanky woman fit for a man of outlandish
proportions. She welcomed him kindly,
offering up the finest selection of ribs and sausages. This sounded good, Pip thought, but not from
a cow or a pig like young Gwendela was suggesting. He then noticed the impressive bounty of
humans occupying the surrounding tables.
At once, Pip grabbed all the people including Gwendela and brought them
up to his house, immediately cutting the beanstalk like an umbilical cord as he
reached the top.
Terrified out of their wits, the humans
had no choice but to accede to Pip’s wishes, climbing one at a time into the
oven to meet their doom. Last in line,
Gwendela shook in her boots until Pip offered her a compromise: be his wife and
spare your life.
Gwendela regretfully agreed and spent the
next several years a slave to his wishes.
Misandra was rolling over in her grave.
Living a life of contentment with his
wife and animals, Pip took comfort in the fact that no one whom he didn’t have
total control over could bother him.
But one day, out of nowhere, a young boy
named Jack came wandering down the street, instantly drawn to the only occupied
house, where Gwendela was standing out front.
Disenchanted with her husband’s brutish ways, Gwendela decided to help
the child, giving him food, until Pip walked in, smelling the human flesh he so
often desired. With the help of
Gwendela, Jack was able to evade Pip by hiding in the oven. Later that evening, Pip noticed that one of his
bags of gold was missing, though he knew his wife would never steal from him.
A few months later, Jack returned for
more food, and hopefully a prize.
Gwendela agreed to let Jack in again, but warned him it would be tough
to escape Pip a second time around.
Somehow Jack managed, taking Pip’s prized hen with him. Just as the hen squawked, Pip woke up from
his nap and finally realized there really was a young human on the premises. He wondered how this could be and finally
remembered that there were three magic beans left at his Earth house. Some peddler must have ransacked his place
and tried to sell them for money.
Taking great thrill in his stealing,
Jack came back one final time, his eye on Pip’s talking harp. Jack realized that the couple was onto him,
so he snuck into the house without either one knowing, snatching the harp which
screamed, “Master! Master!” as he ran away. Pip couldn’t stand the thought of losing his
last prized possession, so he ran and ran after Jack, almost catching him until
he tripped over a rock. He then
recognized something all-too-familiar: a beanstalk. Pip slid down the stalk but then abruptly
broke his crown just as Jack cut the stalk, from the bottom this time.
Pip woke up after a few hours, no
longer angry, greedy, or controlling.
There was no way to get back to his wife or the remainder of his
animals, but he accepted that. He thought
about his father, who never forgot about him, even though Pip had forgotten
about his father.
When he walked to his parents’ house, a young woman answered the door with a surprise that quickly faded
away. Pip asked about his father, but the
woman told him he had died several years prior.
