A thump sounded beside me as an object landed in the springy moss along the dirt path where I walked. Following its trajectory, I figured it had come from a house crowding this side of the walkway; a lacy curtain stirred in a high open window, but no light filtered from within. There was no one in sight.

In the moss at my feet, a pale, stone heart reflected the moonlight. Someone had thrown it from the window above, cast it aside as worthless. Studying the heart, I disagreed. Though dings and dents marred its smooth surface, this heart had never broken, not even with this most recent fall. A brass key and padlock hung from the top by a strip of white ribbon, the key elegantly wrought, the padlock plain.

I crouched down, my outstretched fingers hovering just over the heart. I pitied its fate, thrown away like this.

The moment dragged out. But then I curled my empty hand closed and straightened. Stepping around the heart, I continued on my way, footsteps whispering in the moss. The heart had never broken, I realized, because the owner had never unlocked it for anyone.

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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.