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Salem Youngblood

Author on Reedsy Prompts since Aug, 2025

Stories (5)

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5 Stories

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Hunger in the pines

Salem Youngblood

Submitted to Contest #320

The snow had not fallen. It had invaded. It had pressed down until each branch groaned under the weight of the white oppression. The Wendigo stood among the pines and listened to the trees creak, as if they were begging for release. The wind whipped in powder sheets, blurring tracks, obliterating bootprints, obscuring all but the gnawing at the Wendigo’s ribs. It could not remember how long it had been since the first bite. Years? Weeks? Time was not a river, but a wound that never healed. Nothing but hunger remained. Hunger, and the memory ...

9 likes

Maggots and sweat lies

Salem Youngblood

Submitted to Contest #320

The woods were not a place so much as a pressure. They narrowed the world until it became bark and breath and the heavy taste of wet leaves clinging to the tongue like refusal. Every step took the child deeper into a hush that felt cultivated, as if the silence had been bred here for generations until it learned obedience. There were no birds, or if there were, they knew better than to speak. The path she followed for a while was not a path but a persistence—flattened reeds, bruised moss, a stubborn line through the undergrowth where somethi...

9 likes

Teeth In The Drain

Salem Youngblood

Submitted to Contest #315

The first noise is inside my skull. A low electrical gnaw that has learned the shape of my bones. It lives behind the eyes and hums there, a nest of wasps, a filament that won’t cool. I open my eyes and the dark is a weight. Midnight. The stove clock has a cheap green glow, a sick aquarium color. I have not slept. The room is a mouth that has forgotten how to swallow; the air sits in it and rots. My stomach is a fist that keeps closing. Then opening. Then closing again. You can train the face to stillness, the voice to sweetness, the spine t...

11 likes

1984: Big brothers America

Salem Youngblood

Submitted to Contest #315

The first time I touched 1984 it was already dead. It was a soft book from our school library, the pages thin and translucent like tissue. The spine was brittle, cracked open like a gunshot wound that refused to heal. Mildew, sweat, and some kind of greasy film stained the pages, human residue seeping into the grain of the paper. My teacher slid it across my desk with just a touch of her fingertips before they were withdrawn like icicles in the sun. No preamble. No explanation. Just another assignment to be read and digested and regurgitated...

1 like

Teeth Made For Kings

Salem Youngblood

Submitted to Contest #314

They took me in winter. When the moon was a slit throat across the sky and the snow stank of blood. I had not eaten in two days. The deer had fled south. The old ones in our pack were the first to starve, bones jutting like broken branches beneath their fur. My mother told me not to howl. Not even once. The wrong ears would hear. The wrong ears. They heard anyway. Men with iron in their teeth and torches in their fists. The fire licked the trees. The pups screamed, high and soft, until they were silenced. I do not remember if they were ki...

2 likes