What’s the Rush?
“We have to go!” Jack said as he hurriedly packed as much as he could carry.
“But why?” his mother asked. “You just got home from wherever you’ve been. Why don’t you rest for a while, and then we’ll go.”
“We can’t rest, we have no time, he’s after me!”
His mother asked, “Who’s after you? Such a nice boy like you. Even when I’m angry at you for selling a cow for beans, you try to make up for your mistake. First the gold, then the eggs, and now I thought you would play music for me on that harp. Such a nice boy.”
Jack regretted not telling his mother where he got the gold and eggs as he stood there with a golden harp in his hands.
“I’ll tell you later mom, we have to go, he’ll be here soon,” Jack said frantically.
“No!” was his mother’s stern reply. “We will stay here and discuss with this person who is after you and solve whatever is bothering him.”
Jack didn’t know what to do. “Mom, this person that you want to solve a problem with is a cannibal. The solution to his problem is to eat me, and if you are here, he will probably eat you too.”
Jack’s mother was perplexed. “A person who eats another person?” she muttered to herself. “What kind of person would do that? And why?” she said out loud.
Time was quickly running out. The ground was beginning to quiver as the giant just reached the cloud line. So Jack had to confess all. He rushed through the tale of the beanstalk (which he was surprised his mother had not seen, then again, her eyesight was pretty poor), the stolen bag of gold, the hen that laid the golden eggs, the musical harp, and the giant who was climbing down the beanstalk to crush his bones to make bread.
Jack’s mother may have been slow, but in this case, her motherly instincts rushed in quite fast.
“Crush my boy’s bones! Not while I’m alive!”
She quickly ran to the shed and grabbed her late husband’s axe. Jack’s mother may have been weak-sighted, but she had a lot of strength from years of tending to the house and cow. She found the said beanstalk and, with a few quick hits from the axe, watched as it toppled to the ground.
The giant being way too high up the beanstalk at the time, had no time to escape and fell to his demise.
Jack stared at his mother with pride. He was a little worried about what people would say.
His mother realized his anxiety and said to him, “Don’t worry about the giant or me. The giant was a bad person. We’ll be fine. We’ll just say that you chopped down the beanstalk to save me. It will make a much better story.”
