She lived alone at the edge of the county in a house too big for one person, and the neighbors had long since stopped wondering why she’d never remarried after her husband passed, assuming it was grief or stubbornness or simple contentment with her own company. What they didn’t know was that she’d been working on a solution for years, methodical about it in the way she was methodical about everything, canning vegetables and mending fences and, in the evenings after the chores were done, copying old recipes out of a book that had come to her through her mother’s side of the family, recipes that had nothing to do with food.
The conjuring took the better part of a decade to get right, not because the working itself was difficult but because she was particular about the result, unwilling to settle for anything less than exactly what she wanted after forty years of marriage to someone who hadn’t listened well enough. She used flour and salt and rainwater collected in a specific basin, thread pulled from her late husband’s good coat, and words that felt less like a spell and more like a very long, very specific order placed with someone patient enough to fill it correctly.
What arrived on the porch one October morning was a man of reasonable height and pleasant disposition, capable of good conversation and better silences, who liked her cooking and remembered her birthday without being told and never once suggested she was too particular about how the towels got folded. The neighbors assumed he was a cousin visiting from out of state, then a boarder, then eventually just accepted him the way small towns accept anything given enough time and no better explanation offered.
She never told him what he was, and for many years he never asked. Then one spring morning, while she was folding towels, he told her he preferred them done another way. She nearly dropped the stack.
After that came other things. He wanted tomatoes planted along the south fence instead of beans. He stopped pretending to like one of her stews. He took long walks without explaining where he had been. None of it was cruel. None of it was even unreasonable. That made it worse.
One evening he found the recipe book.
She watched him turn the pages until he reached the one written in her hand.
“Did you make me?”
She could have lied. Forty years of marriage had taught her what happened when people failed to listen, and ten years of conjuring had taught her the danger of imprecise instructions.
What she had never learned was what to do when the thing she made began asking for a life of its own.
The book contained another recipe beneath his.
For correction.
©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys
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