The show had stopped.
It was right there, right in the middle of the pitch, and it had eaten itself up, motion-first. Now there wasn’t even a picture, and the cold beer felt lukewarm in his hand and the half-bag of old chips he’d saved were stale in his mouth.
The show had stopped.
Jack hauled himself out of the chair with difficulty; it was a little more him and a little less furniture every day. Maybe it’d stick to him for good soon, like a surplus vertebra. A tail-bone for his tail-bone, cushioned and padded and sickly old curdled floral print turned rotten from spilled food and drink and too much tobacco smoke. Even as he turned the door his back missed it; there was a stoop in his spine that hadn’t been there before.
The sun was bright. Too bright. How long had it been since he’d been out here? The mailbox was overflowing with books of fast-food coupons and brochures of Bahamas cruises and announcements for half-priced refrigerators.
Then a whimper from above reminded him of where his priorities should be.
There was a giant on his television antenna. A small one – a ten-footer, a giantlette. Not more than a century or so old, by his reckoning.
“Hey,” said Jack. “Get off.”
“Stuck,” whispered the giant, the echo bouncing down the street and up again three or four times.
“You aren’t stuck,” said Jack. “You’re an obstruction to my entertainment. Now get down from there.”
“Stuck.”
Jack sighed and squinted up the antenna. It wasn’t terribly tall, but Jack didn’t have a terribly short house, so it evened out.
But it still made his back hurt.
“Stuck,” whispered the giant again. Its breath was hot in its face, and its eyes – a bit smaller than they should be in that way particular to giants – were just a little wet around the edges.
“Not anymore,” said Jack. And he shoved.
He dragged the giant into the hedge, where its feet wouldn’t quite fit. It’d had a chocolate bar in its pocket – a cheap brand, but unopened. It must’ve been too scared to take a bite.
Typical giant. Climbs up the wrong thing to get back home, then can’t climb back down. Worse than cats. It was very unfair, thought Jack, that everyone agreed stray cats were a nuisance and a pest – bleeding-hearts aside – but the animal control people got nice paycheques and he barely got a moment’s fame for a storybook. It was unfair. It was improper.
He thought of that giant’s face again, as it fell. And he smiled a little, but it crumpled at the cheeks when he tried to think of the first giant’s face.
It was missing. All those years with that memory sitting there in the center of his skull, and now he found it with a big hole drilled through the center.
He wanted to scream. He wanted to curse. He wanted to kick over his half-rotted armchair and throw his beer through the window and stamp on the chips until they were more grease smear than solid – which wouldn’t have been a long trip.
But instead he took a long, deep, shuddering breath, then walked over to his closet.
Inside there was a small cardboard box.
Inside the box was a folded bundle of parchments.
Inside the parchments was an old axe, of that standard household size that was meant to chop logs, rotten furniture, small trees, and the odd fowl’s neck.
Jack looked at the axe.
That was normal.
Then Jack reached out and touched the axe, and that was where things went a bit awry.
Mrs. White didn’t answer the doorbell the first time, second time, third time, or fourth through seventeenth times.
It wasn’t a very new axe, but it wasn’t a very new door either, and it was lousy wood. The mailslot logjam was a far bigger obstacle for Jack; Mrs. White had been even less diligent about picking up her postage than he had been.
She was upstairs when he found her. In front of the dressing-table, in front of the mirror.
“Hello, Snow,” he said. He put down half of the chocolate bar on the table. She didn’t look at it.
“Hello, Jack,” she said. “Do you know, it won’t show me anymore?”
He squinted the mirror. It squinted back at him. “Looks fine to me,” he said.
“Fine, yes. Fairest, no. It used to show me all the fairest, Jack. At first it was just me, then it was someone else, and then it was two people, and now it won’t stop. See it spinning, see it whirling. No end to the thing. They’re all so pretty now.”
“Well, age before beauty,” said Jack vaguely. “Listen, I’ve got an-”
Mrs. White turned her face to his for the first time and Jack felt a very strong compulsion to flinch himself back home and lock the door. It was a fine enough face, but there was a set to the eyes and the mouth and the brows and the chin and the brain behind it that said exactly what it was thinking, and the only reason he didn’t shudder on the spot was that he thought he recognized it, just a little bit, from inside-out.
“Shut up,” Mrs. White said. And then she turned that expression away and he could breathe again.
“Sorry.”
“You should be. What are you doing here with your axe and your bad manners?”
Jack looked down. He was still holding the axe after all. Well. Who’d have thought?
“I’ve got an idea,” he said, and was surprised to find out he did. Was it his idea? It must’ve been, he just hadn’t bothered to speak it yet. Or think it.
“Miracles never cease.”
“I saw a giant.”
“I see.”
“I killed it.”
“Nothing new there.”
“And nobody cared.”
“When was the last time anyone cared about anything you did?”
Jack brought the axe down.
It didn’t hit the mirror, because he wasn’t suicidal, but it drove three inches into the wood of the dressing-table besides Mrs. White’s left hand, and that made her look at him again.
“When was the last time you were the fairest? We’ve let them forget about us, and we’re owed better. I kill a giant, folks should be singing stories! You look in your mirror, it should be showering you in praise! We should be in the papers, on the tv, on the interwhatever. The computers. They’re letting us rot away!”
Mrs. White’s face didn’t move but her fingers were tapping in a sort of slow syncopation; one against the axeblade, the rest against the tabletop.
“Will they bring me another prince?” she asked.
“You’re owed it, aren’t you? Why wouldn’t they?”
“Will they give you your riches?”
“I’ve earned it, haven’t I? How could they not?”
Mrs. White’s fingers stopped and the room barely had a breath in it.
“We’ll call the police first thing,” he said. “Get them on that giant from this morning. Let them know the proper people are doing their proper jobs again and they should be grateful for it.”
“Do you think we could make them dance?” she asked.
“Who?”
“The pretty on – the ugly ones. The ones that aren’t as pretty as me that the mirror lies about. Do you think we could make them dance again, in the red-hot irons? In the shoes?”
“I-”
“I very much think I would enjoy that.”
Jack smiled for the first time since entering the house. “Well, then why not?”
The doorbell rang.
“I’ll get it.”
“No. This is my house. Come along.” Mrs. White peeked out the window and squinted. “You phoned them much too early, Jack. I would’ve liked to have more time.”
“Who?” asked Jack. Then he looked outside too, and saw the flashing lights. And next door, the ambulance.
The giants were on the lawn. Big and tall and sober as stones, hand in hand. They weren’t looking at him, though; they were crouched low over the ambulance, speaking to its contents in soft slow voices.
That was what made him the angriest, thought Jack. They wouldn’t even look at him.
Second place went to whatever that measly runt of an officer was speaking at him. He was barely a baby. Fresh-faced. No stoop in his spine. No rot in his heart. And he was standing there and there were GIANTS standing there, and he was telling Jack some nonsense about laws and rules and other things for the young people, the fake people.
Mrs. White was standing beside him. He wondered what she’d do.
The officer was asking him to come down to the station.
Jack raised his axe, felt a sting in his arm and his chest and his thigh and tumbled down freer and easier than he’d moved in years. Light as a feather. Lithe as a beanstalk.
It was a very straightforward trial. Fair, and fast.
The fingerprints on the candy bar, the testimonies of child and neighbours.
The rants from the defendant.
Fair and fast. That was how these things were meant to be, hopefully
Mrs. White went home to her mirror. The door was never repaired, but the maildrift grew to fill it.
The giants went home. The cast came off within a year or so.
And by the time Jack came out again, older and more bent than ever, someone had taken his chair.