The Diplomat Complains about Rice

by Kat Beyer

The Diplomat didn’t like rice. He told me why in the first village we stopped at, the first village that didn’t know my village had exiled me, and that didn’t call him “Gaia rat,”–the first village that feasted us instead.

He said that rice reminded him of growing up in the monastery back on Gaia. He was adopted into the monastery like many other hungry boys. There was little else to eat but rice.

“Earth was having some population problems,” he said, which was odd, because by now I knew that he called each thing what it was, and what had happened on Gaia had been a disaster. Maybe my village had feared that he brought the disaster with him.

“The rice was never very good. It always had maggots in it.”

I love rice, one of the few foods from Gaia that we like here. It’s an honor-food. But I hate maggots. Now I could understand.

“We were desperate for the protein, so that was not so bad.”

I didn’t understand again.

“Except for the boiling,” he went on. “I hated taking those little lives. It wasn’t their fault that they looked exactly like rice grains.”

He turned his bowl round in his hands.

“They reminded me of the soldiers always marching through. Soldiers like those little lives, caught up in a rice bag that wasn’t their fault.”

He paused.

“My metaphor is not good. Of course rice is a living thing as well. But for me eating rice is like eating grief.”

He had never complained about anything before. At last I ventured, “Then why, Elder, are you eating it now?”

Together we looked down the rice in our bowls, the honor-food of the feast.

“Surely they would make you another dish if they understood?” I pressed.

“On the other hand,” he said, “Maybe I need to learn to eat grief. Maybe I could do with more patience. Besides, they are only trying to be thoughtful. I wish to be a good guest.”

I wish to be a good guest. I have spun those words around and around in my mind many times since. Sometimes I wonder if I was exiled for being a bad guest in my own home, perhaps being ungrateful when I was fed something I didn’t like.

“The maggots and the memories aren’t their fault,” he added.

You Don’t Know Beans

by David

So Jack walks into a bar and he says “I’ve got 5 beans. Who’s with me?”

Nobody says anything at first. But then some guy says “lemme see ’em.”

Jack shows him the beans and the guy says “You pay for these?”

“These ain’t no ordinary beans,” says Jack “these here are magic beans.” He goes on like this, and pretty soon a few guys go with him.

*

The next morning we see this giant beanstalk coming out of the ground. Five trunks are braided and they’re covered with throbbing veins that pump water up out of the earth. The dang thing shades half the town. Jack’s mother says she doesn’t know where he is.

So we wait a few days, but nothing happens except mushrooms are coming up everywhere and the corn isn’t growing, what with dense shadow covering most of the arable land north of Jack’s mother’s house.

At first light on the seventh day we start in on the beanstalk. It’s slow going. Then we get the idea of cutting through some of the vein-like things. Water spurts out like blood, and after a while the whole stalk kinda starts to deflate. We also mix up some salt water and squirt it up some of the tubes. Late in the evening a couple of things fall out of the sky. Some kid comes running up a few minutes later to tell us that bean pods 12 feet long are falling on the north side of town. One of them crashed right through the roof of the dentist’s house. We gotta stop he says.

“No way,” I tell him. “You tell Doc Wilson we’ll be over to fix his roof after we’re done here.”

We keep going, and sometime after dark the thing starts to give. Longitudinal fibers are cracking like cannon shot and soon the noise is so steady we are half deaf. Maybe that’s why, it already being dark and all, we don’t realize at first when the stalk comes down.

The ground jumps and a tremendous cloud of dust explodes away from the stricken stalk. Things get quiet, and we feel pretty good until Jimmy the butcher, said “Where you figure it landed?” Don’t really know what to say after that.

*

The beanstalk took out a good fifth of the town, but I still say it was a small price to pay. And we did get a few tons of beans out of it. But I do wonder what happened to Jack and the others, up above the sky.

The end