Within a drab buffet restaurant where the aging came to dine, I met a glimmering hostess. Pink glitter twinkled across her skin from head to foot; climbing her cheeks, creeping down her neck bellow the collar of her sensible black blouse, and reappearing from beneath her sleeves to adorn her arms. Microscopic flakes flashed beneath the fluorescent overhead lights, winking at me like tiny secrets as she returned my change to me.

Such a fabulous display of unconventional self-love sparked marvel in me. Moved, I said to her, “Your glitter is wonderful.”

As if just noticing me, she responded only with a polite smile. Because she didn’t need me to tell her so–she already knew.

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Summer’s Latest

Beneath the Bluebonnets: Tales of Terror by Texas Women

Read my eco-horror short “Well Being” in this fabulous new anthology, in which a mother follows strange impulses from tainted water to find her daughter.

From Mary Shelley to Tananarive Due and Mariana Enríquez, women have long shaped horror—often without equal recognition. Living closest to the genre’s edge, women know these fears firsthand: lost autonomy, violence, childbirth, survival.

Set in Texas, a land of haunted histories and increasingly restrictive laws, Beneath the Bluebonnets emerges from the raw intersection of terror and endurance. Written by twelve Texas women writers: R. J. Joseph, Lauren Oertel, L.H. Phillips, Kathleen Kent, Madison Estes, Jess Hagemann, Emma E. Murray, Jae Mazer, Iphigenia Strangeworth, Jacklyn Baker, S.G. Baker and edited by Carmen Gray, this collection is urgent, unflinching, and deeply haunting—stories that refuse to look away.