The Talk

My parents’ anniversary was in the fall—the 13^th of October. Every year, they left me at my grandmother’s house so that they could spend the weekend solely in one another’s company. I hated my grandmother’s house. It was creepy and it smelled of stale incense and mildew. Nothing made sense there. It was cluttered with bundles of wilted herbs in every corner. And she always made me help her with the baking. There were no videogames.

This last time was no different. My parents hadn’t been gone for more than an hour when she had me help her make M&M cookies. She was a terrible cook and a worse baker. Every batch either came out burnt or undercooked. One time she even mixed up salt and sugar. Her cookies are usually inedible. How do you mess up a chocolate chip cookie? They’re like the world’s easiest recipe.

Sometimes I felt like she was doing it on purpose, but I could never figure out why.

She was mixing the dough with her hands. She licked one of her bony fingers to taste it. Grandmother made a face and told me that we had forgotten to add something. I looked around at the ingredients we had strewn about on the counter.

“Vanilla,” I told her, proud of my realization.

She asked me to go fetch the bottle from the pantry since her hands were already deep in the sticky cookie dough mixture. I sighed but did as I was told.

My grandmother’s pantry was a small room off the kitchen. She kept it meticulously organized with jars clearly labeled: flour, sugar, popcorn, anything she might need exactly on the shelf in coordinated glass containers, a precisely situated work of art in and of itself.

I had never been in this room before. It felt like it didn’t belong in the rest of her house. Everything in every other room was cluttered and messy, but not here. Here, I could live in forever. Everything made sense. It was orderly, alphabetized, organized by height and color.

For some reason, the room made me sleepy. I was so comforted by the consistency of that pantry, I felt so safe that I wanted to take a nap. I hadn’t been sleeping very much lately. You see, having turned 14 that year, I had been plagued by dreams—sinful dreams. About classmates, teachers even, sometimes girls I’d seen in TikTok videos. Sometimes players from the football games my parents watched on Saturdays and Sundays. I’d wake up covered in my… well, in the evidence of my sin.

I’d change the sheets myself, stuffing the crusty ones far into the back of my closet. Then I would wait until the weekend for a rare opportunity in which both my parents were out of the house, and I could do the laundry all by myself without having to answer any questions.

And sometimes I would have these… urges. Urges so strong I couldn’t do anything about them. I felt like I was under some sort of spell. And I would succumb. It felt so good. But after it was over, I felt so wicked. I wasn’t like myself. I just wanted things to make sense, but they didn’t anymore.

I turned to God for answers, but when He did not respond to my prayers, I turned to Google. I was comforted to find out that I was not alone with this problem. There was an explanation. I was being tormented by a succubus. It was the only explanation. I had tried everything that my research suggested: prayer, meditation, chanting at the demon to be gone.

Nothing had worked, so I had taken to avoiding sleep as a whole, knowing that in my dreams I would have no more control over my own body and would be unable to resist the demon that was visiting me.

But here, in my grandmother’s pantry, I finally felt safe. Nothing could find me here. I curled up on the rug, and I fell into a deep, much-needed sleep. I wasn’t sure how long I had been out when I heard my grandmother gently calling for me.

“Caleb? Is everything alright in there?”

I was roused from my sleep, and I hurried to grab the vanilla I had originally been sent here for. That’s when something hanging on the highest shelf caught my eye: a gold medallion hanging from a thin leather cord on a hook on the highest shelf—tucked behind an almost empty jar of sage. It seemed to hum, calling out to me seductively.

I reached up to the top shelf to try and grab it off its hook, but I was too short.

I looked nervously toward the door, but my grandmother had not come looking for me yet, so I decided to take a risk. I stepped gingerly on the bottom shelf, testing it to see if it could hold my weight. It groaned but stayed. Gaining courage, I put another foot on the shelf, then climbed to the one above that.

I reached for the medallion. My fingers barely grazed it when—CRASH! The shelf under my feet gave way and everything came crashing down to the floor. All the jars and their contents. Glass shattered. I gripped the medallion and pulled it loose from the wall, snapping the hook as I fell with it in my grip, landing among the shattered glass on the floor.

“Caleb!” my grandmother ran into the room, horrified by the noise and terrified by what she might find, but miraculously, lying among the shards of glass, I was unscathed. She saw the medallion in my hand and breathed a sigh of relief, though I saw admonishment behind her usually gentle eyes. She held her arms out.

“Walk towards me,” she said. “And do not let go of that.”

I held so tight to the medallion in my hand that I felt its imprint in the skin of my palm, but with it I was able to walk over the sharp pieces of glass on the floor unharmed.

Once in the safety of the kitchen, my grandmother pulled me into her arms, checking me all over for cuts or bruises. When she was satisfied she found none, she took the medallion out of my hand and hung it around my neck.

For the first time, I was able to look closely and examine the markings on it. Within the circle was what looked like three crosses pointing west, north, and east, with the northern cross having an S shaped line like a tail coming from the bottom of it.

“What is this?” I asked her.

“It’s time you knew of my true identity,” my grandmother told me.

My breath caught in my throat and the air seemed to grow cold around me.

“I am a daughter of Lilith,” she said, taking me by the hands and looking me in the eyes seriously, like one might consider an adult. However, these words meant nothing to me. I stared back at her blankly. She tried again.

“I am a witch, what some might call a demon.”

“Like a succubus??” I blanched. I tried to rip the medallion off my neck while at the same time make sense of what she was telling me.

“But you’re so… old?”

She laughed, unoffended.

“I wasn’t always. I lived a long, beautifully enchanted life that others would consider evil. But the spirit of Lilith guided me and protected me. She will protect you too.”

“But the demons,” I sputtered in protest. “I am already a prisoner of them.”

Grandmother waved her hand dismissively.

“There are no demons.”

“But you said you were—”

“I said that’s what they called me. I am simply a worshipper of all life has to offer. Lilith showed me the courage to give in without shame. She will show you the path.”

Grandma blinked as if remembering something, then quickly added “But magic is not a suitable substitute for condoms, remember that.”

I nodded. My body was starting to feel warm for the first time since it had begun to change. I felt something that was not fear or hatred.

Grandmother pressed my hands in hers.

“It is not the urges that are evil,” she told me as if reading my mind. “It is your fear of them.”

I let the Lilith talisman fall against my chest, and I tucked it into my shirt.

“Now,” she asked me cheerfully. “Did you ever get that vanilla?”

Dazed, I walked back to the pantry, which was neat and organized again, as if the spill had never happened. Had that been a dream? I grabbed the vanilla off the shelf and brought it back to her. Its nutty scent filled the kitchen as she added it to the dough.

We both mixed it with our hands.