The thing is getting them to trust you. The animals.
Dad swears they taste different when they die fearful. Sharp, acidic. He insists that the butcher soothe them before bringing down the ax, though I’m not sure it makes a difference—to Dad’s taste buds or to the animals. But then, my motto is “I don’t eat anything with a face.” I don’t care that it’s cliché—and it is, just as much up here as it is down there—because after hearing enough bleats and squawks and screams and last words, it’s easy to stick to the vegetarian side of things.
I think about where these animals come from, the world far beneath the clouds, and how I’ll never see it. How if the magick holding this stretch of cloud winked out and I fell into the vastness below, I’d explode into nothing—all nineteen feet four inches of me—and since I probably won’t ever do anything great, it’d be like I was never here, was never even born.
I think about stuff like this all the time when I’m in the basement of our castle and I’m staining and stamping leather, doing everything I can to memorialize a life that ended on my parents’ plates. Mom thinks I’m being dramatic and that it’s the animations, westerns, and romances I watch on our flat-screen (magicked for size and reception, of course), and Dad thinks I’m fighting my nature and going through some teenaged rebellious phase, but I can’t help thinking about the animals’ last moments. My theory is, at the end, they smell their own blood before it’s spilled no matter how you try to lull them. And I’m talking loads of animals. Do you know how much livestock have to die to feed even one family of giants? Seems to me there’s something sacrilegious about taking a life and leaving nothing behind except for what comes out of your . . . well, behind.
There was a time, ages ago, when humans looked to the sky and just knew there was something powerful up here. Dad likes to talk about the glory days—how our royal line was up to our ears in gold and how things were When Giants Roamed the Earth—not that he’s ever going to do anything about it. And this isn’t a judgment; when he dies about a hundred years from now and I’m Empress of the Northern Hemisphere, I won’t do anything about it, either.
I know humans like to think they’re special, but it’s galling that they’ve forgotten about us. There are rumors, but all are chalked up to fairy tales, myths, and fables. Still, people are curious, which I was counting on when I dropped the beans.
I hurled two tiny satchels of magicked beans over the edge of our cloud (careful to stand far enough away from the cloudline, of course) and knew they’d find their way to the right people, because magickal things have a way of being found when they want to be. Turns out one satchel ended up burrowing itself in the beach before it was picked up and the other tossed itself into the undercarriage of a delivery truck, eventually dropping onto someone’s feet. (I know this because I see the sense in paying extra for the little tracking slip that magickally appears upon delivery, otherwise who knows where your packages end up?)
Yes, the beans were expensive, and yes, my parents would probably blow two gaskets if they knew, but what else could I do? Take another walk around the castle and observe the practically nonexistent change of season? Visit the market and maybe catch a urine-soaked whiff of a new shipment of humans rolling by? Perhaps watch a jetliner roar past in the distance?
Safe. Boring. And no one around to complain to.
Not much came of the first bag of beans, so I admit I had high expectations for the second. Those beans were supposed to bring up a friend, an ear, a confidante. Someone to tell me about the world below, since I was too scared to see it for myself. You know how people in those old movies share their lives with one another? I guess I was expecting that. I was not expecting a beanstalk-riding thief. Especially one who thought it was a cool idea to shoot up the magick beanstalk and steal the Golden Goose Dad had won in the PowerGlobe raffle, which we sorely needed because even if you’re royalty, do you know how much it costs to magick a five-mile cloud in place?
And taking the Golden Goose and a bag of gold? That was just plain greedy. For folks like that, nothing’s ever enough.
Which is why, as I run sandpaper for the hundredth time across this bare wood frame that I’m going to transform into a child-sized leather chair and I hear the window latch, I know that it’s Jack.
He’s come back.
The basement windows near the ceiling have old latches, which I’m assuming is how he slipped in last time. I hear his tiny feet hit the stone floor, and he takes a few steps but then freezes.
I turn. This is only the second time I’ve been this close to a human before—I mean, one who is here of his own free will and not dirty and scared and confused.
In my best grim voice (because that works on TV), I say, “Jack.”
I don’t even know if that’s his name. Probably it isn’t. I just call him Jack because after he stole the bag of gold and the Golden Goose, all week long Dad couldn’t stop yammering about that little Jack shit who broke in. Mom actually ran after Jack during his getaway and saw him climb down the beanstalk and rub it three times, after which it shrank down to the earth below and out of reach.
“Don’t tell me the goose has stopped laying those twenty-four-karat eggs.”
“She’s gone,” Jack says. “I swear it.”
Jack has a BBC accent. British news, not Oliver Twist. Don’t know what he’s doing on the coast of Massachusetts.
“You took a big risk coming back up here. My mom said she’d skin you alive if you showed up again. You get caught and you’ll end up on someone’s plate by morning.”
“So—so it’s true, the stories. That you . . .”
“Eat people? I’m a vegetarian. Never ate a face and never will.”
“But the other giants . . . do they really eat babies?”
“Yeah, baby chickens, baby sheep, baby cows, baby whales—”
“You know what I mean,” he says. His gaze darts all over the basement, over the wicker baskets and the stone floors and damp walls, like I’ve got a bag of babies tucked away somewhere like a bunch of onions.
The thing is, giants do have a thing for babies, including baby humans. It’s something about the meat. Succulence.