After Hailee and I had our… disagreement, it was time for me to head back home. I did the same as I had done earlier that day and took the giant’s path for a faster trip. It was getting pretty late, so every minute counted.

When I got to the clearing, I headed straight for a patch I had prepared for the beans. Once I was standing in front of it with beans in hand, however, I hesitated.

Since my influence and my inspiration didn’t align on who planted the beans, that factor probably didn’t matter. What definitely mattered on the other hand were the bean merchant’s instructions.

Plant the beans with thoughts of what I need.

Intent when planting wasn’t part of any traditional way of telling Jack and the Beanstalk I had heard, including the king’s, but this wasn’t a very traditional retelling. Rather than worrying about going off-script, the problem I was having was deciding what I actually needed. Was it something tailor made to help me avoid the draft like the bean merchant said or was it a giant beanstalk?

It’s easy to say that I actually needed the former and only wanted the later, but need is something relative to context. You need more water when you’ve only got a bottle’s worth and you're stranded in the middle of a desert, but you don’t when you’ve just chugged four cups of it at home with a stockpile sitting next to you. Yes, I needed to do something soon if I wanted to avoid getting drafted, but did that something even require the beans to begin with?

Putting some more thought into it, the army probably wouldn’t commit resources to chasing me down if I left. After all, there wasn’t any confirmation that I was special and the giants next door were a bigger issue for them to be worrying about. It would be a different case if they knew I had magic, but they wouldn’t have a chance to know that in the first place if I didn’t plant the beans.

Okay, so I didn’t ‘need’ something to avoid the army, at least not immediately, I thought. So in what context did I ‘need’ a giant beanstalk?

I could say the context where I was trying to follow the original story, but then I’d just be lying to myself. The merchant said that as long as I needed it the beans could give me anything. When one option was to plant a giant beanstalk and the other option was literally anything, the only reason to plant a giant beanstalk was to make a statement.

“I did it.” That's what I wanted to tell myself. That’s what I wanted to tell Agatha and Hailee and that’s what I wanted to tell the family I had left behind on earth. “I did it.” I hadn’t proven myself in the old world with my writing or anything else I’d done and I hadn’t proven myself here either.

Sure, I could grow some useful magic beans and have Hailee apologize to me, but I wanted something that would impress her beyond her belief. When she asked me up in the trees if she could come with me and Agatha if we left and when she said she wouldn’t mind marrying me if I didn’t leave her behind, she wasn’t saying those things because she wanted to rely on me, she was saying them because she felt like she had no choice, but to rely on me.

I’m sure that was a big part of the reason she was so upset with me. If Agatha couldn’t rely on me, what was she thinking hoping to do the same?

I didn’t want her to feel that way, I wanted her to feel like she could rely on me for real. I wanted her to know that when I said something, it meant that I’d really follow through with it.

Was that a want great enough to become a need for me? Yes. Yes, it was. And it had become a great enough need to surpass my desire to avoid the army. But in the end, it wasn’t one I chose to fulfill.

The need to avoid the army and the need to prove myself, those had blinded me to the other possibilities. Anything I needed. I hadn’t thought about it since I'd gotten here. I figured that even if I obtained magic, transferring souls from world-to-world or dimension-to-dimension would be on the rarer side of what could be achieved, but with this, I could go home.

These beans were my genie in a lamp. I couldn’t tell them that I needed all the power in the world and genuinely believe it, but this? This was definitely something I needed them for.

Did I miss my parents? I couldn’t say so, but I knew I’d be happy if I could see them again. And I’d be happy to let them know that their son was still alive or that at least part of him was in some way. And I’d be happy to tell them about all the things I’d seen and what it took for me to get back to them. And once I’ve told it all, I’d be happy to write it down.

I sighed. Even though I had never taken it seriously enough before coming here, I wanted to write more than I had ever wanted to before.

It was decided. With my need and my want now in line with each other, it was time to plant the beans. I wasn’t exactly sure of the process for planting magic beans beyond putting them in the dirt, but Old Jack’s Minor Farming experience made me happy with the spacing at least.

“Jack?”

I turned around. Agatha had come out to the porch without me noticing.

“Yeah, Mom?”

“What are you doing?”

“Planting something before we leave.”

“Well, I don’t expect anything to grow in time for us to take it with us,” she said, as she approached.

“It’s not for us.”

“Then who's it for?” She gave me a confused look.

“Hailee,” I lied. “I feel bad that we’re leaving her behind.”

Agatha smiled. “Well, you could always get married before we leave,” she joked, while rustling my hair. “Then you won’t be having to worry about leaving her behind.”

“And what would Andrew think of that?”

That made her frown. “We shouldn’t be lingering on him like that. Hailee shouldn’t either. She’s still a young woman. She needs to move on and live her life.”

“Okay,” I said. It wasn’t the ‘I agree with you' kind of okay, but it was close enough to me saying I wouldn’t bother her about this for the time being.

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Agatha took a deep breath, then squatted down next to me. “So what are you planting for her?” she asked. “Flowers?”

I hesitated. “... Beans,” I said, revealing the last one still resting in my hand. Her timing was really something. If she had given me just a few more seconds before she called out to me, I’d have planted it. If she had given me just a few more seconds, I could have lied.

“Beans?” She tilted her head. “Why would Hailee want you to plant her beans?”

“Well, she figured that we wouldn’t be staying after hearing the news about the count, so she thought that she’d at least get some magic beans grown by a Jack before I went.”

“Magic beans?” Agatha tensed up when she heard me utter those words. “She gave you money to buy her some magic beans?”

I took a deep breath. “No.”

“You spent some of the money from the cow on the beans?” she asked.

“I promised some of the money from the cow to buy the beans. Keith said he’d give me more if I let him butcher the cow and sell her first.” Of course that was a lie, but it was a lie that would take at least until the next day to confirm.

Until the next day was all I needed. My giant beanstalk would be in by the morni— Oh…

“And you expect me to believe that?” Agatha asked.

“Yes,” I said as I planted the last bean while focusing on my need for a giant beanstalk.

“Look at me, Jack.”

I did. She looked heartbroken. I had been expecting anger or maybe disappointment based on the other stories, but not this. I didn’t quite have the words to describe it until later, but the look she gave me, it was the look of a parent who’d just realized their kid was the kind of trash who’d steal their last possession from them.

“I’ve been your mother long enough to know when you’re lying," she said.

I doubled down. “It’s not a lie.”

“Yes. It is.”

“If you don’t believe me I can take you down to the butcher’s shop tomorrow and he can tell you.”

“You’re sure that’s what you want us to do?” she asked. Her words didn’t feel cold, but they definitely felt distant.

“If that’s the only way to get you to believe me,” I said.

“Alright then.” Agatha stood up straight. “I’ll go with you to the butcher’s shop tomorrow, but for the rest of today, I would like not to see you again.”

There was a pause, but I didn’t say anything. I’m not going to lie, her saying that hurt a little.

“I’ve already made dinner,” she continued while she walked back to the house, “You can take with you with whatever you need for the night. Henry and Joyce will probably have you for dinner if you prefer that instead. Either way, I don’t want you here for tonight.”

“Don’t you think you’re taking this a bit too far?”

“Jack.” She stopped at the porch, but she didn’t turn around. “There’s some lies I can forgive and some lies I can’t. If you’re telling the truth, then I hope you can find it in yourself forgive me. But if you’re lying and I see that tomorrow, then for my heart, I think we should part ways.”

Another pause. “I won’t let you down.”

“Get what you need while you still can,” she responded. “I want you gone once the sun sets.” Agatha left me with that before heading into the house. She probably went straight to her room since I didn’t see her once while I packed my things for the night.

I took the dry parts of the dinner she’d made from the kitchen, a sac to carry them with, my special pot, some rushlights to light my way through the forest, and a cloak and a blanket to keep warm. It was going to be a night in the forest for me.

Once I got past the trees at the clearing’s edge, I set up camp just a bit further than I had been able to see up to from the porch. I could probably get someone to let me stay with them at the hamlet for the night, but I didn’t want to go so far away from my beans. I didn’t even want to let the clearing leave my sight.

I already hadn’t been keen on the idea of leaving behind a giant beanstalk leading straight to a giant’s house in my yard unattended. Magic beans that opened portals to other worlds or something similar gave me even more reason to be.

Magic beans that lead to another world. Thinking more about that, we were getting new levels of off-script with this retelling and it was starting to get me worried. It felt like I’d been given a user’s manual when that cow with a cat riding on its back walked into my new life. Now that I’d realized the powers that the beans offered, however, it felt like that user manual had become outdated and I was going to have to figure things out on my own again.

Maybe I didn’t have to cut the beanstalk down to kill the giant. Maybe I could use the other beans to send the giant into another dimension.

I don’t think I’d want to risk bringing one to my version of earth, though, so that’s probably not going to happen. I don’t think I’d even go in the first place if I couldn’t bring Agatha along with me. Which is why I’m glad I got to plant that last bean as giant beanstalk. It would be my backup, just in case the dimension jumping beans were only something I could use.

If anyone could use them, though, then I was going to bring Hailee’s family along too. With the threat that the giants pose, my earth was the safest place they could be.

The same could be said for the rest of the villagers, but I wasn’t about to bring them all along too. Migrating one family between earths with no papers or adjustment to modern living was already going to be work enough.

Wait, I thought, Ben and Matthew.

I clicked my tongue, having realized my oversight. Imagine them returning home only to find that they’re family had been disappeared from this world. It was still better than the family experience I had found myself waking up to when I got here, but that didn’t make it any less sad. I needed to bring them. I wanted to bring them. Joyce would keep mentioning them in every conversation for the rest of her life if I didn’t bring them.

If they were still alive, then I’d have to bring Ben and Matthew. The only problem was that they’d been dragged off to war. Besides the fact that they had been sent to reclaim the count’s territory, I didn’t know where to start looking for them. Maybe that would be the point of the giant beanstalk in this retelling? I’d climb up the beanstalk and find some treasure that would help me find and collect our missing twins at the top.

I moved on from the thought and onto organizing others. Whatever the case was with the twins, I’d figure it out when the time came.

By the time I had decided that, it was getting dark. When I put my mind to it, I was pretty good at burning time thinking. All the particulars of reflection that didn’t make it into what I just summarized probably took me an hour to get through. Not bad, but I was going to need a few more hours like that before I would call it a night, so I moved on to editing my story. No, not the one listed on my page, but the one that you’re reading right now.

Like I said before, I had developed the ability to recall any story that was told to me and included in that was my recollection of the events of my life. Adding onto that, if I summarized those events, changed any of their details, or reordered them, I could remember the new versions of them just as well as the old ones.

In other words, my memory was good enough to edit and rearrange an entire story inside of my head and once I’d found my way back home, I was going to make some serious bank off of that and this story for sure. I wasn’t exactly happy with how events played out today, but on the brightside, now I had a lot of really good content to replace the ‘Jack the Lumberjack’ filler sections I had put in.

With a folded cloth placed against the tree, I laid my head back. At this point, I’d gotten used to noting the day’s events as they happened, but I was going to have to give them a quick run through again before I could decide how to express what happened.

I smiled. The excitement I felt as I set off that morning with the cow, the determination I’d felt when thinking of helping Hailee, that warm feeling I got when I thought of home that kept on rising—all of these emotions returned to me as I reminisced. I frowned. The pressure that Hailee’s situation put on me, the anxious feeling I’d gotten seeing that kid watch me, the fear I couldn’t admit to myself when I talked to Hailee and Agatha, that I’d been a fool duped by a con—all of those returned as well.

I laid my hand upon my special pot. Everything would be fine. Yes, there had been other Jacks who had been fooled before me, but they didn’t have a magic paper telling them they were the protagonist of the bean story. Even if things took an odder turn than they had already, I was sure the plot would get back on track eventually. I just hoped that an odder turn wasn’t something that would lead me into more trouble than I’d already signed myself up for.