White surf hissed against a pebbly black shore, curling around my toes in a wash of cold spray. Secrets from distant lands washed onto this ancient beach, catching on pebbles and snagging within tide pools. Collected and kept here where few knew to seek them.

The older secrets rested further up the beach, but the most recent ones lived here at the tide line. Dipping my fingers into the salty water, I came back up with a smooth stone the size of my thumbnail. No feature indicated what kind of wisdom it might hold, but I liked its shape.

Bringing the black pebble close to my mouth, I murmured, “Make your secrets known to me.”

Turning my head, I listened close over the roar of the pounding surf. Nothing, nothing.

Maybe this one contained no hidden message after all. But then… something. A mournful voice from far across the ocean, breaking with sorrow.

“Not all dreams come true.”

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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.