A Wild Swan Read Online Free

mother has always treated him as if he were bounty and hope, incarnate.
    The mist-girl tells Jack that everything the giant owns belongs rightfully to him. Then she vanishes, as quickly as the wisp of an exhaled cigarette.
    Jack, however, being Jack, had assumed already that everything the giant owns—everything everybody owns—rightfully belongs to him. And he’d never really believed that story about his father getting dysentery on a business trip to Brazil.
    He raps on the door, which is opened by the giant’s wife. The wife may once have been pretty, but no trace of loveliness remains. Her hair is thinning, her housecoat stained. She’s as offhandedly careworn as a fifty-foot-tall version of Jack’s mother.
    Jack announces that he’s hungry, that he comes from a place where the world fails to provide.
    The giant’s wife, who rarely receives visitors of any kind, is happy to see a handsome, miniature man-child standing at her door. She invites him in, feeds him breakfast, though she warns him that if her husband comes home, he’ll eat Jack for breakfast.
    Does Jack stick around anyway? Of course he does. Does the giant arrive home unexpectedly? He does.
    He booms from the vastness of the hallway:
    Fe fi fo fum
    I smell the blood of an Englishman.
    Be he alive or be he dead,
    I’ll grind his bones to make my bread.
    The giant’s wife conceals Jack in, of all places, the very saucepan in which her husband would cook him. She’s barely got the lid put down when the giant lumbers in.
    The giant is robustly corpulent, thundering, strident, dangerous in the way of barroom thugs, of any figure who is comical in theory (he wears a jerkin and tights) but truly threatening in fact, simply because he’s fool enough and drunk enough to do serious harm; simply because he’s a stranger to reason, because killing a man with a pool cue seems like a justifiable response to some vaguely insulting remark.
    The giantess assures her husband that he merely smells the ox she’s cooked him for lunch.
    Really?
    Here we move, briefly, into farce. There’s nowhere else for us to go.
    Giant: I know what ox smells like. I know what the blood of an Englishman smells like.
    Giantess: Well, this is a new kind of ox. It’s flavored.
    Giant: What?
    Giantess: It’s brand new. You can also get Tears of a Princess Ox. You can get Wicked Queen Envy Ox.
    She serves him the ox. A whole ox.
    Giant: Hm. Tastes like regular ox to me.
    Giantess: Maybe I won’t get this kind anymore.
    Giant: There’s nothing wrong with regular ox.
    Giantess: But a little variety, every now and then …
    Giant: You get suckered in too easily.
    Giantess: I know. No one knows that better than I do.
    After the giant has eaten the ox, he commands his wife to bring him his bags of gold, so he can perform the day’s tally. This is a ritual, a comforting reminder that he’s just as rich today as he was yesterday, and the day before.
    Once he’s content that he still has all the gold he’s ever had, he lays his colossal head down on the tabletop and falls into the kind of deep, wheezing nap anybody would want to take after eating an ox.
    Which is Jack’s cue to climb back out of the saucepan, grab the bags of gold, and take off.
    And which would be the giantess’s cue to resuscitate her marriage. It would be the time for her to holler, “Thief,” and claim never to have seen Jack before.
    By evening, she and her husband could have sat laughing at the table, each holding aloft one of Jack’s testicles on a toothpick before popping them into their mouths. They could have declared to each other, It’s enough. It’s enough to be rich, and live on a cloud together; to age companionably; to want nothing more than they’ve got already.
    The giant’s wife seems to agree, however, that robbing her husband is a good move.
    We all know couples like this. Couples