use it or lose it

Art by Margaret Ely Webb, 1918, “Aldine Readers, Book Two.”

think about it. like, assuming that gender even works the same in this fantasy culture as it does in ours, with gender conflated with sex (because let’s be real, all of these stories assume that), men wouldn’t be the ones to make the babies, so why would they be the ones to care for the babies? why is fighting and hunting necessary for leadership?

writing a matriarchy this way is just lazy, because you’re just taking the patriarchy and just swapping the people in it, rather than actually swapping the culture. especially when there are so many other cool things you could explore. like, what if it’s not a swap of roles but of what society deems important?

maybe a matriarchy would have hunting and fighting be part of the man’s job, but undervalued. like taking the trash out or cleaning toilets: necessary, but gross, and not noble or interesting. maybe farming is now the most important thing, and is given a lot of spiritual and cultural weight.

how would law work? what crimes would exist, and what things would be considered too trivial to make illegal? who gets what property? why?

how would religion work? how would you mark time or the passage into adulthood? what would marriage look like? if bloodlines are through the mother, bastardy wouldn’t even be a concept - how does that work?

what qualities would be most important in a person? how would you define strength or leadership? what knowledge would be the most coveted and protected? what acts or roles are considered useless or degrading?

I think what really bothers me about the whole “men take care of the children and tend house because they’re not in charge” thing is that it reinforces the idea that traditionally feminine work SHOULD be undervalued. That there’s no way anyone could see raising children and think, “wow, what a valuable contribution to society”. Even though families are what societies are MADE of, and if you ignore the welfare of your children the society falls apart in a generation or two.

Imagine if women were seen as the ideal political leaders BECAUSE they’re the ones best suited for raising young children. What if it was assumed that government positions were sort of scaled-up households, and that only a leader who saw their subjects as their children could be fair and compassionate enough to rule effectively? What is a village, or a country, but an extended family?

On the one hand, the ability to use physical force effectively is super important for a low-tech society, and there’s always the threat of hostile military takeover, either from outsiders or via internal revolt. On the other hand, a society where all the men want to rebel is probably not a society that’s being run at all effectively, and there are other ways of maintaining control (ie religion, cultural traditions, propaganda, etc). Women could be the more educated group–in some ways that’s even intuitive, since a non-magical preindustrial society is one with a high infant mortality rate, which means it has to have a high birth rate to compensate, which means women will be pregnant a lot. If they have trouble consistently working physically demanding trades, why not assign them to jobs that require more mental exertion? Why not a society where all the lawyers are female, all the doctors are female, all the historians and most respected poets are female? If you keep that up for long enough, eventually that gets seen as an inherent sex difference, and men don’t exert physical force because holy shit they’d have no idea what they were doing once they gained power.

So if aptitudes and interest and the raw stuff of skills and traits is gender-neutral, how come we think some things belong to one gender or another?  The answer is quite simple.  Because any trait or skill that society values gets assigned to the highest gender in the hierarchy.

Let me repeat that for the folks in the back.   Any trait or skill that society values gets assigned to the highest gender in the hierarchy.  And you can see this because as values change, tasks and traits get passed between genders.

The best example of this that I know of is sexual appetite.  See, one thing that really boggles peoples minds when they read medieval literature is that their assumptions about sex are, to us, backwards.  Ask anybody today who has the greatest sexual appetite, and they’ll say it’s men!  Who has the least sexual appetite?  Women!  A great deal of research has shown that this is bullshit, that there is a wide range in both men and women and gender tells you exactly bupkiss about sex drive, but even people who know this are guided by unconscious assumptions that men are ravening sex fiends and women are only in it for the emotions.

Except in the middle ages, they thought the exact opposite.  Men were pure, in it for emotions and cerebral affection.  Women were the ravening sex monsters who couldn’t control their lusts.  Why?  Because celibacy and sexual innocence was the highest sexual virtue.  Therefore, men had it and women didn’t.

This changed in the Renaissence, when potency and virility (and hence, lots of sex) became the highest sexual virtue.  Therefore, men have high sex drives and women don’t.

When you look at occupations today, and which ones we value and which ones we don’t, especially as you track changes over time, you will also notice that when men enter a field in large numbers, its prestige and pay rises.  When women enter a field in large numbers, its prestige and pay fall.  It is not that some jobs are high-status and men gravitate to those jobs, and women gravitate to “lesser” jobs.  Instead, JOBS THAT MEN DO ARE VALUED, AND JOBS THAT WOMEN DO ARE NOT.

So for example, in the USSR there were a heck of a lot more female doctors than there were in the west at the time.  Since “doctor” was a high-status occupation in the West, the West assumed that women were more equal in that they had access to high-status jobs.  Not so; women were just as oppressed in the Soviet regime as they were in the West.  The difference was that in the USSR, being a doctor was a low-status job.  Therefore, it was open to women.

This post was insightful and interesting, but also rubbing me kinda the wrong way, and I couldn’t figure out entirely why until I saw @beatrice-otter’s addition.

The first thing you need to decide, when building any fictional society, is how it sustains itself. What does it run on? How does it gain power, gain security, manage labour, acquire resources? This doesn’t mean that you have to be an expert in economies or politics (although research helps). What it means is that you have to have some kind of an idea of what sort of civilization you’re looking at.

The concept of a ruler-as-parent is not inherently matriarchal (paternalism in violently bigoted societies is often a major thing, in fact, and lots of patriarchal civilzations have equated kings with fathers). The concept of a conquest-driven warrior society is not inherently patriarchal, either, we just associate parenting with women and violence with men because of our own socially-conditioned presumptions. And any civilization which heavily preferences one group of people over another is probably going to be exploitative, because that’s the main motivation for encouraging social inequity - it lets the people in power hold on to their power, and accumulate even more by increasing the disparity between their authority and other people’s. (Which isn’t to say that some of the above ideas aren’t still good ways to look at things, just that it’s kind of an incomplete perspective).

The ‘elite’ set the tone for what is valued or devalued, as it suits the climate of their society. When computers were a new and niche thing, and no one was quite sure how far they would take off, programming was considered a branch of secretary work - it was women’s work (and WoC’s work).  As computers became more influential, and men in the field became more frustrated with having their work ‘devalued’ by its association with women, a concerted effort was made to drive women away from computing and associate it with them, instead. And now the typical image of a computer expert is, of course, a dude with glasses. Image campaigns were launched, more men were recruited to the field and fast-tracked to promotions, women were discouraged and pushed out via harassment and reduced career mobility, and historical retcons were put forward to make it seem as if they’d never been there to begin with. The social equivalent of headbutting your partner out of the classroom window on Science Fair Day and telling the teacher you did all the work yourself.

Of course, there is a question of how one gender initially gains this kind of advantage over another, and then builds off of it in order to reach the level of privilege where this sort of shit can fly. We don’t honestly know for certain, but women are, of course, strongly associated with the ‘gives birth’ end of the reproductive equation. Pregnancy, labour, breastfeeding, these things can all disadvantage someone when it comes to doing other stuff - especially if you’re doing them routinely because infant mortality rates are high and birth control is less-than-reliable. Free time and mobility are significant factors in who can explore their interests or focus on learning new skills, travel to other places, or investigate untested concepts. 

So, provided the genders of this hypothetical matriarchy are still composed along our own lines of thinking*, that should probably be taken into account when considering what runs this civilization**. Either the people going through pregnancies need to have an easier time of it for some reason (i.e. magic makes it easier on them, society is comprised of immortals who can waste time on loads of stuff anyway, etc) or the people not having babies need to have a harder time of it for some reason (i.e. magic makes it rougher on them, pregnancy provides some kind of immune boost that makes people more resistant to some kind of plague, etc).

Because the unpaid/unacknowledged part of the equation is the most important. A matriarchy which is run by rule of violence still might not be all that interesting to read/write about in the end (at face value, it can look less like a meaningful social critique, and more just like ‘look how horrible the world would be if women were in charge! This is what feminists want!!!’ which is.. tiresome). But in order to switch that around, step one is figuring out where the power is, and how this one group of people got a hold of it. That will give you the best indicator for how they should go about keeping it, which will, in turn, tell you what social roles are probably going to be the most lauded and compensated.

*More works which change this up would be pretty cool, I think. And shine some light on the arbitrary nature of a lot of presumptions about gender. 

Mary was a beautiful baby, sweet and affectionate, but by the time she’s three she’s turned difficult and strange, with fey moods and a stubborn mouth that screams and bites but never says mama. But her mother’s well-used to hard work with little thanks, and when the village gossips wag their tongues she just shrugs, and pulls her difficult child away from their precious, perfect blossoms, before the bites draw blood. Mary’s mother doesn’t drown her in a bucket of saltwater, and she doesn’t take up the silver knife the wife of the village priest leaves out for her one Sunday brunch. 

She gives her daughter yarn, instead, and instead of a rowan stake through her inhuman heart she gives her a child’s first loom, oak and ash. She lets her vicious, uncooperative fairy daughter entertain herself with games of her own devising, in as much peace and comfort as either of them can manage.

Mary grows up strangely, as a strange child would, learning everything in all the wrong order, and biting a great deal more than she should. But she also learns to weave, and takes to it with a grand passion. Soon enough she knows more than her mother–which isn’t all that much–and is striking out into unknown territory, turning out odd new knots and weaves, patterns as complex as spiderwebs and spellrings. 

“Aren’t you clever,” her mother says, of her work, and leaves her to her wool and flax and whatnot. Mary’s not biting anymore, and she smiles more than she frowns, and that’s about as much, her mother figures, as anyone should hope for from their child. 

Mary still cries sometimes, when the other girls reject her for her strange graces, her odd slow way of talking, her restless reaching fluttering hands that have learned to spin but never to settle. The other girls call her freak, witchblood, hobgoblin.

“I don’t remember girls being quite so stupid when I was that age,” her mother says, brushing Mary’s hair smooth and steady like they’ve both learned to enjoy, smooth as a skein of silk. “Time was, you knew not to insult anyone you might need to flatter later. ‘Specially when you don’t know if they’re going to grow wings or horns or whatnot. Serve ‘em all right if you ever figure out curses.”

“I want to go back,” Mary says. “I want to go home, to where I came from, where there’s people like me. If I’m a fairy’s child I should be in fairyland, and no one would call me a freak.”

“Aye, well, I’d miss you though,” her mother says. “And I expect there’s stupid folk everywhere, even in fairyland. Cruel folk, too. You just have to make the best of things where you are, being my child instead.”

Mary learns to read well enough, in between the weaving, especially when her mother tracks down the traveling booktraders and comes home with slim, precious manuals on dyes and stains and mordants, on pigments and patterns, diagrams too arcane for her own eyes but which make her daughter’s eyes shine.

“We need an herb garden,” her daughter says, hands busy, flipping from page to page, pulling on her hair, twisting in her skirt, itching for a project. “Yarrow, and madder, and woad and weld…”

“Well, start digging,” her mother says. “Won’t do you a harm to get out of the house now’n then.”

Mary doesn’t like dirt but she’s learned determination well enough from her mother. She digs and digs, and plants what she’s given, and the first year doesn’t turn out so well but the second’s better, and by the third a cauldron’s always simmering something over the fire, and Mary’s taking in orders from girls five years older or more, turning out vivid bolts and spools and skeins of red and gold and blue, restless fingers dancing like they’ve summoned down the rainbow. Her mother figures she probably has.

“Just as well you never got the hang of curses,” she says, admiring her bright new skirts. “I like this sort of trick a lot better.”

Mary smiles, rocking back and forth on her heels, fingers already fluttering to find the next project.

She finally grows up tall and fair, if a bit stooped and squinty, and time and age seem to calm her unhappy mouth about as well as it does for human children. Word gets around she never lies or breaks a bargain, and if the first seems odd for a fairy’s child then the second one seems fit enough. The undyed stacks of taken orders grow taller, the dyed lots of filled orders grow brighter, the loom in the corner for Mary’s own creations grows stranger and more complex. Mary’s hands callus just like her mother’s, become as strong and tough and smooth as the oak and ash of her needles and frames, though they never fall still.

“Do you ever wonder what your real daughter would be like?” the priest’s wife asks, once.

Mary’s mother snorts. “She wouldn’t be worth a damn at weaving,” she says. “Lord knows I never was. No, I’ll keep what I’ve been given and thank the givers kindly. It was a fair enough trade for me. Good day, ma’am.”

Mary brings her mother sweet chamomile tea, that night, and a warm shawl in all the colors of a garden, and a hairbrush. In the morning, the priest’s son comes round, with payment for his mother’s pretty new dress and a shy smile just for Mary. He thinks her hair is nice, and her hands are even nicer, vibrant in their strength and skill and endless motion.  

They all live happily ever after.

*

Here’s another story: 

This Ankh-Morpork that we’re submerged in is so alien at that point in her timeline, it’s gruesome and cruel and oppressive because it’s under a gruesome, cruel and oppressive tyrant. Yet despite that, there is still kindness in the heart of the book - it values old Vimes’ mercy and young Sam’s innocence, it values the fact that Vimes wants to avoid undue violence, to save as many as he can, and shield people from the tyranny for as long as he can.

It’s such an emotionally charged book and there is a lot of darkness in the story itself- a blood-thirsty serial killer, power-hungry men, ruthless paranoia, and the awful, inhumane underbelly of a regime - but where most other books would have done so, it avoids traumatizing its characters just to establish that. Darker shifts in tone so often entails that the narrative doles out meaningless suffering and trauma just to establish itself. Night Watch ultimately avoids that, because it uses other means to make the text feel heavy and oppressive. Part of it is from the plot itself, in that Vimes knows what happens behind closed doors, he know what Swing is capable of and the knowledge of that threat is high-risk enough to let readers know of the stakes.

The main emotional conflict instead comes from Vimes battling with himself, reconciling with wanting to go home versus, well, Sam Vimes being Sam Vimes, which means doing his best at saving everyone, history, timeline and causality be damned. We know that young Sam will become cynical and bitter and drunk somewhere down the line, we know that half the Night Watchmen will die, we know that the city will remain cruel despite this Hail Mary attempt at revolution. Which is why the narrative is so intent on telling us that Vimes’ kindness matters - in mentoring young Sam, in getting the prisoners off the Hurry-Up Wagon, in preventing undue riots and undue brutality, in keeping the fighting away from Barricade as long as possible. The city’s going to hell in a hand basket, might as well make people’s lives easier.

Vimes can’t save Ankh-Morpork from history taking its due course, but the powerful emotional catharsis is seeing him coming to the decision to try and save everyone anyway – simply because he can’t envision himself not doing it. So he digs his heels in and makes whatever difference he can in the moment.

Because Night Watch in an inevitable tragedy - only one of the two stories can have a happy ending and in order for Sam Vimes to go back to the present, to his wife and his son and his Watch and his city, the revolution has to fail or else that timeline ceases to exist. There is no way for him to save both his men and his future but he’ll be damned if it doesn’t try - he wouldn’t be Sam Vimes otherwise. Every time it I re-read it still feels like he’s that close to succeeding.

C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain (via soracities)

I did not expect that to be a CS Lewis quote.

Also, dear lord, yes.

(via conductivemithril)

Holy FUCK.

I know we’ve seen this discussion pop up more than once (like the author of this piece points out, it usually cycles through every few months) but this is probably one of my favorite set-downs of the Non-HEA crowd yet. 

It’s well phrased, fairly comprehensive, and just slightly scathing.

It’s not edgy, it’s not clever, in fact what it shows me is that you do not understand the genre on a fundamental level and shouldn’t be writing for it.

Romance is a fantasy genre, people don’t read fantasy for endless suffering (thank you GRRMartin et al for making every edgelord in the world think nitty gritty detail = pain and suffering without relief and flooding the genre with their shitty reimaginings of the characters from Lord of the Rings but set to the plot of SAW) they read fantasy to know that the suffering will end. That evil will eventually be defeated, that good things can and will still happen and that the sun will shine again.

Romance is no different from that, except it is a genre primarily considered to be feminine and therefore subject to ridicule and the belief that somehow if a woman can do it, it must be easy

“But Joy,” I hear some of you say, “Romance doesn’t have that reputation because of sexism, it’s because of how many bad writers get published in it and make it look bad.” *angry buzzer sound* oh I’m sorry that was incorrect, you see every genre has an abundance of shitty books that make it to print, whether it’s goofball sci-fi or Lord of the “all my characters are white because of historical accuracy” Rings 94949392.0 (or if you really want to start a fight, every mediocre white man considered a classic by the literary genre and lauded by academia for writing about wanting to have an affair with one of his students/the inevitability of death) and while they are subject to criticism, there’s still not quite the same vitriol that Romance gets for wanting, what is essentially, a happy life.

There is nothing wrong with feel good media, there is nothing wrong with wanting to enjoy something a little bit silly and unapologetically happy. The popularity of coffee shop Aus in fandom is both unsurprising and nothing new. It’s quite literally common romance tropes that have been around forever but with the diversity of fandom (*eyes ao3 tag* kind of) and I will die on this hill defending the validity of Happily Ever Afters and Happily For Now before I let anyone try to take it from my icy cold grip.

Writing and reading fanfic is a masterclass in characterisation. 

Consider: in order to successfully write two different “versions” of the same character - let alone ten, or fifty, or a hundred - you have to make an informed judgement about their core personality traits, distinguishing between the results of nature and nurture, and decide how best to replicate those conditions in a new narrative context. The character you produce has to be recognisably congruent with the canonical version, yet distinct enough to fit within a different - perhaps wildly so - story. And you physically can’t accomplish this if the character in question is poorly understood, or viewed as a stereotype, or one-dimensional. Yes, you can still produce the fic, but chances are, if your interest in or knowledge of the character(s) is that shallow, you’re not going to bother in the first place. 

Because ficwriters care about nuance, and they especially care about continuity - not just literal continuity, in the sense of corroborating established facts, but the far more important (and yet more frequently neglected) emotional continuity. Too often in film and TV canons in particular, emotional continuity is mistakenly viewed as a synonym for static characterisation, and therefore held anathema: if the character(s) don’t change, then where’s the story? But emotional continuity isn’t anti-change; it’s pro-context. It means showing how the character gets from Point A to Point B as an actual journey, not just dumping them in a new location and yelling Because Reasons! while moving on to the next development. Emotional continuity requires a close reading, not just of the letter of the canon, but its spirit - the beats between the dialogue; the implications never overtly stated, but which must logically occur off-screen. As such, emotional continuity is often the first casualty of canonical forward momentum: when each new TV season demands the creation of a new challenge for the protagonists, regardless of where and how we left them last, then dealing with the consequences of what’s already happened is automatically put on the backburner.

Fanfic does not do this. 

Fanfic embraces the gaps in the narrative, the gracenotes in characterisation that the original story glosses, forgets or simply doesn’t find time for. That’s not all it does, of course, but in the context of learning how to write characters, it’s vital, because it teaches ficwriters - and fic readers - the difference between rich and cardboard characters. A rich character is one whose original incarnation is detailed enough that, in order to put them in fanfic, the writer has to consider which elements of their personality are integral to their existence, which clash irreparably with the new setting, and which can be modified to fit, to say nothing of how this adapted version works with other similarly adapted characters. A cardboard character, by contrast, boasts so few original or distinct attributes that the ficwriter has to invent them almost out of whole cloth. Note, please, that attributes are not necessarily synonymous with details in this context: we might know a character’s favourite song and their number of siblings, but if this information gives us no actual insight into them as a person, then it’s only window-dressing. By the same token, we might know very few concrete facts about a character, but still have an incredibly well-developed sense of their personhood on the basis of their actions. 

And this is why many people who discover fic stop reading other stuff. Once you find the genre you prefer, you tend to read a lot in that genre. Some people love mysteries, some people love high-fantasy. Saying you love “fic” really means you love this character-driven genre. 

So when I hear people be dismissive of fic I used to think, Are they just not reading the good fic? Maybe I need to put the good fic in front of them? But I think it turns out that fanfiction is a genre that is so entirely character-focused that it actually feels weird and different, because most of our fiction is not that character-focused. 

It turns out, when I think about it, I am simply a character-based consumer of pop culture. I will read and watch almost anything but the stuff that’s going to stick with me is because I fall for a particular character. This is why once a show falters and disagrees with my view of the character, I can’t just, like, push past it, because the show *was* the character for me. 

Right now my big thing is the Juno Steel stories, and I know that they’re doing all this genre stuff and they have mysteries and there’s sci-fi and meanwhile I’m just like, “Okay, whatever, I don’t care about that, JUNO STEEL IS THE BEST AND I WANT TO JUST ROLL AROUND IN HIS SARCASTIC, HILARIOUS, EMOTIONALLY PINING HEAD.” That is the fanfiction-genre fan in me coming out. Someone looking for sci-fi might not care about that, but I’m the type of consumer (and I think most fic-people are) who will spend a week focusing on what one throwaway line might reveal about a character’s state of mind. That’s why so many fics *focus* on those one throwaway lines. That’s what we’re thinking about. 

And this is what makes coffee shop AUs so amazing. Like, you take some characters and you stick them in a coffee shop. That’s it. And yet I love every single one of them. Because the focus is entirely on the characters. There is no plot. The plot is they get coffee every day and fall in love. That’s the entire plot. And that’s the perfect fanfic plot. Fanfic plots are almost always like that. Almost always references to other things that clue you in to where the story is going. Think of “friends to lovers” or “enemies to lovers” or “fake relationship,” and you’re like, “Yes. I love those. Give me those,” and you know it’s going to be the same plot, but that’s okay, you’re not reading for the plot. It’s like that Tumblr post that goes around that’s like, “Me starting a fake relationship fic: Ooooh, do you think they’ll fall in love for real????” But you’re not reading for the suspense. Fic frees you up from having to spend effort thinking about the plot. Fic gives your brain space to focus entirely on the characters. And, especially in an age of plot-twist-heavy pop culture, that almost feels like a luxury. “Come in. Spend a little time in this character’s head. SPEND HOURS OF YOUR LIFE READING SO MANY STORIES ABOUT THIS CHARACTER’S HEAD. Until you know them like a friend. Until you know them so well that you miss them when you’re not hanging out with them.” 

When that is your story, when the characters become like your friends, it makes sense that you’re freed from plot. It’s like how many people don’t really have a “plot” to hanging out with their friends. There’s this huge obsession with plot, but lives don’t have plots. Lives just happen. We try to shape them into plots later, but that’s just this organizational fiction we’re imposing. Plot doesn’t have to be the raison d’etre of all story-telling, and fic reminds us of that. 

Your slow-motion montage backed by a Gregorian choir can be done with a few technques that all involve repetition.

First is epizeuxis, the repeating of a word for emphasis.

Example:

Falling. Falling. Falling. There was nothing to keep Marie from plunging into the rolling river below. She could only hope for a miracle now, that she would come out alive somehow despite a twenty-foot drop into five-foot-deep water.

Then there’s anaphora, where you write a number of phrases with the same words at the beginning.

There were still mages out there living in terror of shining steel armor emblazoned with the Sword of Mercy.

There were still mages out there being forced by desperation into the clutches of demons.

There were mages out there being threatened with Tranquility as punishment for their disobedience, and the threats were being made good upon.

Mages who had attempted to flee, but knew nothing of the outside world and were forced to return to their prison out of need for sustenance and shelter.

Mages who only desired to find the families they were torn from.

Mages who only wanted to see the sun.

his name is Tiffany. a bold bright name. a stardust name. a girl name. but he is not a girl. he knows this, even if others don’t. his mother puts him in dresses, teaches him how to sew, chastises him when he lets his voice get low.

“my great-aunt’s friend’s sister,” says his mother, with her red lips tight, “once knew these girls that spoke and diamonds came out of their mouths. you know what happened to the nasty one? she got toads. that’s your future if you don’t figure out how to be a nice little girl.”

so he speaks gently. but the whole time he is wondering: who gave them the language of gems. who gave them the language that rolled out of them. it must be magic. and if there is magic, maybe there is hope for him.

he takes off in a dark night. a sad night. one where the fire was too low and he was sick of mirrors. he leaves his mother a note: gone to find where the gems grow. 

in the black woods, he cuts off his hair. wears his father’s clothes. feels, at last, whole. runs and runs and runs until his air comes out in a wheeze. walks for weeks and weeks.

he finds the old woman carrying water. she is ugly, her mouth all twisted angry. but she carries the water alone. 

the boy does not have much. but he has shoulders. a good back. hands that work. when he takes her burden, she says, “thank you, young man.” and he smiles at her, but doesn’t say anything.

her house is damp. she feeds him stew, apologizes. says she used to make lovely foods but the price of milk and eggs got far too high. she says: if you carry my water for five weeks, i will give you something special. and he agrees.

she talks for him. spends a lot of time telling him of people he never met. girls with lips blood red. girls with white fairy dresses. boys who fell in love with swans. 

the boy says little. just nods. sleeps on the floor of her empty barn. when she’s not looking, he darns her clothes for her, keeps the floors swept, fills the lanterns with oil, makes her a blanket for the coming winter. 

on the end of the fifth week, she gives him the beans. tells him that they have been passed down in her family, that this was her portion. she says that she is too old now for such adventures. that she hears the beans will bring treasure. fortune. all the things of greed. she says: i will give them to you, for what you have done to me.

in the morning, he takes off. he feels the weight of them in his pocket. he thinks of the old woman and the stories and the sight of her tired hands. he stands in the market for a long time, unspeaking, simply staring at the cobblestones beneath him.

jack’s voice is the last call in the evening. a beautiful cow, young and thick and healthy. 

the boy has no money. he bounces the magic bean in his pocket, and thinks of treasures. 

“wait,” he says. 

jack turns. 

transaction complete: one cow for a handful of magic beans. the boy walks the cow home to the old woman, gets there in the morning. they are both very tired. he falls asleep beside the beast in the hay. dreams of the foods the old woman can cook now that she can get milk.

when he wakes up, he is changed. it is as if he simply turned into who he was made to be. not a new body. familiar. the body he could always see.

the old woman stands at the door of his barn. she says, “good morning,” and then she says a new word. a word he’s never heard. a name. his name. a boy name. 

he repeats it. it is a jewel in his mouth, so he says it again. another diamond.

“time to fetch water,” she says, winking. the whole way, he whispers his name. it never quite tastes the same, always beautiful, always a fine thing, always his. the something special he was lacking.