Grams’ Grimoire (Her)
Noah Ray Phibbs
Artwork © Lyndon Polan
After all was said and done, I would do it all again. I don’t regret lying awake in anticipation
until Ralph’s heavy snoring indicated he had finally been swept into rum-soaked dreams. That was the night I first met Her.
I crept down the hall staying near the wall to keep the venerable floorboards from groaning—past Mum and Ralph’s bedroom door, through the 70s-tainted kitchen, and carefully behind the sleeping drunk in the La-Z-Boy positioned near the glowing television. I prayed to the front door not to creakily betray me, and it mercifully complied; I shut it softly, but my heart was thudding hard as I sprinted away from the house—not stopping until I reached the gravel road—Grams’ recipe book bouncing against my back through the rucksack.
Out of habit, I paused at the road to look and listen for any vehicles driving through the night.
Nothing, of course. Cherry Grove wasn’t likely to have any passers-by this long after midnight, especially considering the bizarre recent events:
a bull drained of blood;
a strange, babbling figure spotted in the cornfields;
and the sudden disappearance of the local farm cats.
I crossed the road, stepped through snagging weeds and orange lilies, out of the ditch and into a field of August-tall corn. I still remember how impossibly full the Moon was, the low-hanging ivory orb of wisdom cast dancing shadows as the breeze tousled the high tassels. My own shadow was stretched as the moon rose behind me; the night was more ripe than the maize.
A long while before I reached the field’s rear perimeter, where raspberry brambles tugged on my clothes and scratched my face, but did little to slow my procession. Then there was a narrow strip of trees, the sound of the river—soft and hypnotic. I paused for a moment on its banks to look back at my lunar companion, who had followed close enough to peek at me over the treetops. I saluted her, then turned to follow the river’s current. I had thought I would need to constantly reference Gram’s delicate scrawls to find my way, but the book stayed stowed in my bag. An animal magnetism pulled me south as if I were a bird.
I do not know how long I walked for. With no cellphone to reference—as some intuition told
me it would not be welcomed where I was headed—only the moon’s well-practiced circuit hinted at chronology. My dad had taught me how to track the passing hours using the sun or moon before he passed, but I was far too young then to absorb the lesson. Even without measure of time or distance, I knew my destination when I closed in on it. Parting from the riverbank, I moved into a thicket, fighting my way through wiry branches until the woods regurgitated me into another field.
These acres were low and green: beans. The moonlight gave clear visibility to the farm buildings a few kilometers away, displaying the steel-framed shed, a smattering of squat sleeping-quarters crowned by one large farmhouse, and an ancient barn with its tired roof caved in. I once knew the names of the people who lived there, though at that moment I could not recall them. I was urged onwards by something deeper than my consciousness, and the names of these people were (and remain) unimportant. Most things seem inconsequential, since I found Her.
I was in the middle of the field when I was jolted to my knees. I dropped so suddenly, I lost my
balance, and was pitted forward on all fours before I pushed myself back onto my haunches. The bag was off my shoulders in a flash; the book was in my hands. Grams’ bunched-up cursive filled out an index card, taped onto the disintegrating cardboard cover, titling the tome as ‘Family Recipes’. There was a rush of exhilaration through me, complemented by an uncanny tension in the atmosphere.
***
After discovering the unassuming book in the crawl space and skimming through it, I was
bewitched. The first half was a boilerplate recipe book—pies, casseroles, soups involving chicken feet—but it took a sharp turn after the instructional on cabbage rolls. Listed in the same style and writing as the recipes before, these subsequent directions had little to do with food preparation.
I asked my Mum about the book—delicately—as Grams was Dad’s mum, and anything to do with Dad either sent Mum into a spiral or Ralph into a rage if he heard about it. She flipped through it quickly with a concentrated grimace on her face.
“You can read that?” she finally asked, handing the book back. She turned her focus back to her
own book, some romance drivel. “I can’t make that out at all. Heck, I didn’t think they taught you guys cursive in school.”
I did learn cursive in school. Ralph’s son, two years below me, had not. I didn’t correct her, or
mention the strange ‘recipes’ that Mum couldn’t interpret.
“I think your Dad may have pulled this thing out one time to make something,” Mum recalled,
looking up from her copy of This Cowboy’s Coming Home and staring into the popcorned ceiling. “I don’t know if he could read it either. Not that it would’ve helped, he was an awful cook—still, at least he tried.” She gave a light chuckle, followed by a morose look. She excused herself to the bedroom and left me alone with the book in my lap.
The recipes were an obsession for me. There was a general deficit of entertainment in Cherry
Grove; besides, the contents of the allegedly illegible writing would have captivated me in any setting. I had never met Grams, but it was hard to correlate the petite Chancel Guild woman to the written instructions she had left behind. From the pictures I’d seen, it would’ve been easier to imagine reading one of these “recipes” had caused the tight curls in her hair. Adding to my enthrallment, a lingering familiarity. Not just for Grams’ style and language, but the instructions themselves felt more like refreshers than new information; yet I’m sure I had never heard or imagined these procedures before reading them in Gram’s hand.
***
Familiarity was what I once again felt, kneeling between rows of soybeans in the moonlight, as I
opened the book to the desired page on the first try. The full Moon acted as a reading lamp, my eyes ran down the ingredient list, my hands removing each corresponding item from my bag and setting it in front of me. A strange mise en place was conjured one element at a time.
A cigarette, Ralph’s brand.
Mortar and pestle, made from maple.
Sage I had grown in the garden and dried in my south-facing window.
Ragweed, painstakingly braided.
A handful of wild blueberries and raspberries.
Some bull’s blood, grotesquely sloshing in a mason jar.
A corn husk doll, lovingly crafted.
One black candle.
My garden trowel.
I set about my frenetic work with soybeans swaying lightly around me. The minuscule calligraphy was trailing across my eyeballs, but my mind—or maybe more so my body—flowed in a well-choreographed dance. I pinched the cigarette and rolled the tobacco into the mortar, added the sage, then took up the pestle and pulverized them. I took the trowel and dug a pocket in the ground. Bull’s blood was poured over the corn husk doll, staining it in rich crimson. I mashed the berries against the puppet as well, covering the effigy and my hands in an oozing paste of scarlet and purple. The ragweed braid was woven over the desecrated doll, before I laid it into the shallow hole, sprinkled the crushed herbs over it, and finally I interred the unconcerned corn-man. I shoved the candle into the freshly disturbed soil and lit it, then I knelt in front of it, scanning the recipe one last time—double checking each line of the looping text.
It was then I saw something had been overlooked. I hadn’t missed a step or ingredient listed in the text—it was the recipe itself that was missing a fundamental factor. Most pages bore headers like:
“Shepard’s Pie” or “Buttermilk Biscuits”; even the esoteric ones titled themselves “Dealing With The Lingering Dead” or “Curing The Soon-To-Be-Damned”. This recipe had no title, no header, no declaration of the finished product. I realized, all at once, I had no idea what I was doing here—or what I had made. I looked at the candle, and a terrible impulse to flee burst through me.
Then the cats came. Mewing, hissing and mrwaaa-ing in the thousands, surrounding me. They approached slowly, as though I were prey to be stalked. I was internally screaming at my legs—run! run dammit!—but they mutinously remained kneeling, awaiting communion.
Fear peaked. I blacked out. Then it was just me and Her.
Her name I now know. It is beautiful, but I (any of us using meaty tongues) cannot pronounce
it. She stood in nothingness. I suppose I did as well, though my body was not tangible there. She was awesome—righteous, in a biblical sense. Her cyclopean body was a harmonious fusion of earth, stone and water; blood, pus and flesh. Vines of fruit, thorns and viscera dangled from Her aphroditic form. The hair: curtains of endless waterfalls, turning to mist as it fell over Her breasts. Her eyes were the colour of the forests—intoxicating golds and greens and browns. When She spoke to me, I fell in love. Not the sexual or romantic affections of humanity, but the zealous devotion of a cultist. Without Her asking (as I knew She would), I offered myself as Her loyal servant, the high priestess of Her primordial religion. She graciously took me as Her Own—as Her Child—and offered me the unconditional love I had sought since my Dad’s passing.
When I awoke, tucked neatly in my own bed, I did so with a smile on my face. The world, as She
quickly surmised, had grown cancerous while She slept. Apollonian men had defiled Her—raped Her and Her Daughters—while claiming they reaped only what they had sown. Well, She was grateful to be awoken. The Earth is ripe for renewal. She is thankful I can continue where Grams left off. She wants my help now; She needs my fleshy hands, and my youth, to prepare before She returns to full, furious glory.
I have no doubts what will happen when She is strong—She shows me in my dreams each night.
The scourge that the Men of ‘Civilization’ have brought upon Her will be returned a hundred-fold. Death will be the least of man’s concerns as his family, his falsely claimed lands, and all his pathetic treasures are blasted torturously from the mortal plane. I would be foolish to ask for mercy or exemption, as you cannot leave a malicious tumour untreated and hope to cure the patient; the real reward will be my eternal reunion with Her. I only ask—selfishly—that I may bear witness to Her wrath and beauty up until the end. Maybe I’m sick, but I want to see men burn, drown and scream, as something infinitely more powerful than them delivers indiscriminate justice.
I want to watch them truly reap what they have sowed.
© 2026 Noah Ray Phibbs
AFTERIMAGE
Mud and blood are the stewards of history,
tradition acts as the guiding hands; belief, the great filter.
Time is not a line, but a knot.
Noah Ray Phibbs
is a fiction writer born and raised in Southwestern Ontario. Influenced by the psychological unease of Shirley Jackson and the existential absurdity of Kafka, his work explores the strange intersection of the esoteric and the routine, often juxtaposing the surreal with the mundane. His stories have appeared in a range of literary journals, and he continues to write both short and long-form fiction from his home in London.