They arrived as the full moon crested the horizon like an enormous gold coin. Silhouetted people in ones and twos materializing beneath the spreading limbs of the Memory Tree. Their outlines wavered and shimmered beneath the hazy moonbeams, solidifying as the night grew darker. I wasn’t the only person sitting beneath the boughs, so I wasn’t the only one with guests tonight. The living, strangers to me, sat or stood apart, awaiting the return of their own remembered loved ones, unconcerned with my presence.

All around me, my guests talked and laughed about times long gone. Some had already met each other through me, through previous events like this, but others introduced themselves for the first time. Eyes glinting and teeth flashing in the dark. I simply sat nearby and observed these friends long passed. They smiled or nodded at me, knowing their place here with us tonight meant they held a place in my heart.

The night grew longer and longer as the moon fled through the sky. The strangers nearby finished their visits and left, but we remained, for I could not visit the Memory Tree often. I opened drink after drink for us and grew dizzy as the twin suns began to pink the sky. With the oncoming morning, my guests wished me farewell and rained away into nothing.

Alone again, I lay on my back in the grass and the fading stars overhead spun and spun. I missed them all so much.

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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.