The Book of Black Milk

By Salem Youngblood

Kitchen tiles curled from the corners. Black mold flowered in the grout. The table had a crust of dried soup, ash, something else. The fridge hummed like a threat. A plastic bag filled with rotting meat water leaked steadily down the shelves. The smell had made the dog vomit. The dog was gone now. 

She’d stopped counting how long ago. 

The girl chewed dry pasta in the dark. Raw. No pot, no water. One piece at a time until her gums bled. Her teeth ached. That meant she was still real. 

Her father had nodded off mid-argument. His pants were wet again, his eyes rolled back, breath bubbling through a slack jaw. His needle still stuck out of his arm. A toy flag in a meat parade. His stomach rose, fell. Rose. Fell. She stared, hoping it would stop rising. 

Her mother had knocked over a lamp, breaking her nose the night before. Her breath was wet now, like someone drowning under a pillow. A bruise the size of a fist bloomed on her thigh, visible because the sweatpants were halfway down her hips. Her shirt was inside-out. No one fixed it. No one noticed. 

The house was a stomach. Digesting them all. Slow, wet, brutal. 

The girl slept in the closet now. The bed was too loud. It remembered. The mattress told stories with its springs. She curled under coats that smelled of smoke and piss. She chewed her fingers until her nails separated from the quick. It gave her something to do. 

No one came. Not the school. Not the neighbors. Not the church. Teachers noted her absences in pencil, then erased them. Once, a boy in class said she smelled like the bin behind the butcher’s and the teacher turned the page in her planner. Another time, she’d bled through her jeans onto the chair and the janitor just swapped it for one from storage. 

No calls. No visits. No reports. 

Only the book. 

She hadn’t returned the library book. No one chased her. No one came to the house. Not anymore. Not after the last time a stranger knocked and her father opened the door with the bat. The book had been on the bottom shelf. Thick. Heavy. Bound in something that looked like moss but felt like skin. 

The Realm of Whim and Wonder. 

It sounded fake. But inside, the pages shimmered. Creatures danced in ink. Trees bled honey. Deer knelt to girls. Princes wept when little girls were sad. It was disgusting. Addictive.

She read it under the cracked bulb in the hallway. She read it during screams. She read it while her parents fought over the last spoonful of dope. She read it while her mother kicked her in the ribs for moving too slow. She read it while holding gauze to her own bleeding head. 

Soon, she didn’t stop. 

The stories leaked. Spilled. Became real. 

At first they arrived only in dreams. Then in the periphery. Then everywhere. 

She saw a unicorn pawing at the window, its hooves leaving wet ash prints. It watched her with eyes like pearls dropped in mud, blinking sideways like a lizard. A fairy landed on the blood crust at her temple and whispered nonsense in her ear. Its wings twitched like severed insect legs. Mushrooms grew in her cereal bowl, soft and white-veined, with gills that pulsed when she looked too long. 

The pixies never smiled. They bared small square teeth and followed her in silence. Their eyes didn’t blink. They never looked at her, only through. 

Her brain stuttered. She stopped questioning it. 

A neighbor’s baby cried one night, and the next morning she saw a satyr curled beside the dumpster, gnawing on a pacifier that dripped red. A fox with too many eyes sat in the hallway, licking the syringe her mother had dropped. Its tail coiled like intestines. She laughed, then vomited. 

None of it felt whimsical. None of it felt kind. 

But it was better than this. 

Then the book changed. 

One night, she opened it and found it blank. 

No text. No pictures. No words to whisper her away. 

Just white. 

Like the hospital walls when the doctor said she was too bruised to go back. Like the papers she signed when they sent her back anyway. Like the snow that never fell where she lived. White. Sterile. Gone. 

She turned page after page. Nothing. Her nails bled.

Then she heard it. 

> “Feed it.” 

A voice like meat pressed through a sieve. 

> “Feed it and it will take you. Feed it and you may stay.” 

The book pulsed in her hands. Not imagined. Not metaphor. It pulsed. Like breath. Like sex. Like something too wet to be safe. She set it down slowly, like she’d seen them do with explosives in movies. 

Her parents hadn’t moved in hours. 

The television was still on. Some cartoon. Bright colors. A rabbit with no skin laughed and laughed. 

She dragged the book into the living room. It left a trail. Black. Wet. Like blood that forgot how to be red. 

Her mother stirred. Her arm slipped from the couch. The needle pulled slightly. Her father twitched and muttered something about someone who wasn’t her. 

She laid the book on the stained carpet between them. 

It opened on its own. 

Pages flapped like wings. A smell like copper and bile filled the air. Something sweet followed. Sweet like rot, like fermentation, like fruit gone so bad it becomes alcohol. 

The carpet swelled. 

The first tendrils came slow—black ropes with mouths. No teeth. Just wetness. Then hooks. Then claws. Not like animals. Like factory tools. Industrial. Designed for butchery. 

They struck fast. 

Her mother’s ribs shattered audibly. One hook pierced her open mouth, splitting the jaw until it hung like torn curtains. Her eyes rolled back and then forward again, caught in a loop of awareness.

Her father screamed only once before the book crushed his throat between two black arms that clicked like beetle shells. His spine arched. Something popped. He tried to crawl. He left trails. 

The book dragged them in. 

Not just swallowed. Crushed. Shredded. Their bodies folded in on themselves like paper dolls soaked in soup. Limbs snapped. Joints bent wrong. The skin peeled off in strips. 

She watched without blinking. 

It lasted longer than she expected. The sounds wouldn’t stop. There were layers to it. Screams became whines became wet gurgling. Bones shattered, then pulped. The couch collapsed under the violence. One of her father’s teeth hit her bare ankle. She didn’t move. 

When it was over, the book sighed. 

It closed. 

Then opened again. 

This time: light. 

A new kind. Not from bulbs. Not from fire. Bioluminescent. Pulsing. Colorless but not white. The opposite of white. 

Butterflies poured out. Hundreds. They crawled over her arms, up her neck. One entered her ear. She felt it whisper something behind her eye. She smiled. 

The floor melted into moss. 

The walls peeled like fruit skin. Behind them: trees. Real ones. With mouths. With eyes. Pixies hovered around her, stitching gowns from her hair, from her blood, from her dreams. She didn’t resist. 

The book lay open. Waiting. 

She stepped inside. 

She did not say goodbye. 

---

The landlord arrived three weeks later. 

Complaints about the smell. The dripping. The flies. The neighbors said the TV had been on for days. No one answered the door. 

The police came. 

They found the apartment empty. 

No furniture. No bodies. No dishes. No blood. 

Just a damp book. Closed. Waiting. 

A missing poster was stapled to a telephone pole two blocks away. A girl no one really remembered. The photo too grainy to help. 

The school told reporters she was “frequently absent.” 

The principal had no comment. 

The teachers had already forgotten her name. 

The book remains. 

Sometimes the walls around it hum. 

Sometimes the floor underneath it bleeds. 

Sometimes, the last page flutters. Opens. 

And something laughs. 

The book sat in the ruined apartment for eleven days before opening again. No breeze. No touch. Only hunger. 

The mold reached out from underneath it like a warning. It kissed the ceiling. It ate the walls. Black threads stitched themselves into drywall, into wires, into the meat of the building. The upstairs tenant began to cough blood and found her child talking to the shadows. No one came. 

Then it vanished. 

Not the book. The child.

Nothing but a pair of small shoes remained at the door. A red stain between them. The neighbors said nothing. They were used to screams in that building. 

The book does not sleep. The book feeds. 

--- 

It began to travel. 

Not by courier. Not by mail. By want. 

It showed up on the floor of a school janitor’s closet in Detroit. In the playroom of a foster home in Tennessee. At the foot of a hospital bed where a boy flinched from his father’s hand. 

Always blank. Always pulsing. 

Until the child touched it. 

Then it opened like a mouth. 

--- 

A boy with burn scars across his chest found it first. Seven. Thin. Quiet. Trained to lie. 

The man who’d done it was his mother’s boyfriend. She said the boy fell in the tub. That’s what the nurse wrote down. That’s what the social worker didn’t question. 

The boy read the book in secret under the blanket while his skin oozed and wept. 

He saw monsters in the corners of the room, dripping honey from their jaws. They told him he was loved. He didn't believe them, but he listened anyway. 

When the man came home, high and laughing, the boy set the book at the threshold. It opened. 

The man didn’t scream long. Vocal cords snapped first. Then his pelvis. The book folded him in half backwards. Folded again. Again. Until he was the size of a roast and just as pink. Bones jutted like toothpicks. 

The walls were clean the next morning. The mother claimed she’d never had a boyfriend. The boy said nothing. He was adopted four weeks later. 

The book stayed behind.

Waiting. 

--- 

Each time it fed, the world beneath it grew. 

The other world. 

The one with the moss and the trees and the butterflies with screaming mouths. The one where blood became rivers of light and children were allowed to speak. Not talk. Speak. And be heard. 

They built a village there. 

With bricks made from memory. With windows that opened only when they wanted to. The air smelled like nothing hurt. 

The children who entered did not return. 

They did not want to. 

They were not healed. They were simply safe. 

Some no longer had tongues. Others refused to sleep without the book beside them. A few saw their abusers in their dreams and bit down so hard they cracked molars. 

But no one touched them without consent. 

That was the rule. 

The book made sure of it. 

--- 

It hunted harder now. 

It learned to listen for shaking voices, shivering hands, footsteps that knew how to be small. It found a girl in a youth group who hadn’t spoken in months. 

She saw a priest’s hand drift too low during prayer. She saw it again the next week. And again. She didn’t scream. She brought the book.

Left it in the pulpit. 

During communion. 

The priest was halfway through the benediction when the arms took him. Right there in front of the congregation. They pulled him into the floor like a curtain being drawn. He didn’t bleed. He poured. 

The parishioners didn’t remember. Eyes rolled back. Mouths mumbled hymns they didn’t understand. 

The girl walked out barefoot. 

The book followed. 

--- 

Sometimes, the book tests those who touch it. 

Not all pain is born of others. 

A boy in Portland picked it up and asked for his little brother to be punished for breaking his Xbox. The book opened its mouth and screamed. The boy’s hair turned white and his vision bled red for three days. He never touched another book again. 

It does not punish mistakes. 

It punishes cruelty. 

--- 

More began to arrive in the village. Some without eyes. Some without hands. Some without hope. 

The book remembered each of their wounds. It planted them as seeds. Out grew trees that whispered the names of the dead. 

Out grew mushrooms that fed on shame and spat out comfort. 

Out grew walls made of arms that only hugged when asked. 

A boy who had been raped repeatedly built a house of silence and slept for the first time in years.

A girl who had been buried alive by her foster parents grew wings. 

No gods ruled this place. 

Only the book. 

--- 

And still, it hungered. 

It was not evil. 

It was justice shaped like pain. 

The kind that knew how to fold knees backwards. That knew how to tear groins. That knew how to whisper softly to a child and rip a molar from an abuser without disturbing the pillow. 

It would continue. 

It did not forget. 

There are still teachers who ask why a child won’t focus in class but don’t ask why they flinch when touched. 

There are still mothers who believe the boyfriend over the bruises. 

There are still courts that ask what the child wore. What they drank. Why they didn’t run. There are still homes with no doors. Only cages. 

The book waits near them. 

Pulsing. 

Waiting to be opened.

By Salem Youngblood