Jack and the Beanstalk

This is the whole tale, the same ten pages it runs in Pillowbook on the phone. Not a word is cut, and nothing asks you to sign up. The first three pages carry the paintings they were given; the rest of the plates are in the app, where the book is read one page to a screen.

Reading time is about five minutes at an unhurried pace, one page every thirty seconds or so. The giant is enormous but never cruel. Nobody is chased and nobody falls: Jack takes the harp, thinks better of it, and carries it back.

Above the clouds the light was wide and bright, and there was a house with a door so tall he could not see its top from the step. Inside, everything was enormous. He found a shallow pantry nook and sat down on the boards with his knees drawn up, and there was bread there, and cheese, and he ate some, and he had not eaten properly in two days.

Then the floor began to shake, slow and even, and the giant came in and sat down to his supper. He was three and a half times the height of a grown man. He had a barrel of soup and a loaf like a bolster, and rumbled about how hungry he was. The boy held very still behind the hanging cloth. The giant never once looked round.

When the giant had gone out again, the boy heard something he could not place — a small bright sound, going up and down, coming from the end of the table. It was a harp no bigger than a loaf, singing all by itself with nobody touching it. He had never heard anything like it in his life. He lifted it in both hands.

He was halfway down the stalk before he stopped. He stood on a broad flat leaf with his back against the coils and the harp against his chest, and listened, and the whole thing went through him at once: it was not his. Nobody had given it to him. He looked down at the roofs, then up at the clouds, and knew what he was going to do.

Climbing up is a great deal harder than climbing down. He went slowly, with the harp wrapped in the front of his shirt so that only the curved gold top showed, and the clouds closed round him damp and cool, then opened again into that wide bright country. He was out of breath when he got there. He knocked on the enormous door with both fists.

The giant came out and knelt on one knee so that his face was near. The boy held the harp up as high as he could reach and gave it back, and said he was sorry. The giant looked at it for a long moment. Then he went inside and came out with a speckled brown hen and set her carefully into the boy’s arms, because nobody had ever brought him anything back before.

The way down was long, and it was late afternoon by the time his boots touched the grass. His mother was at the table with the lamp lit. The hen sat on the windowsill where the five beans had been and looked out at the garden as if she had always lived there. There would be an egg in the morning. There would be an egg every morning after that.

The end.