In the corner of my vision, the notification light on my phone blinked blue. Again. Again again again. Never when I looked right at it. Just in my peripheral.

Still, I picked the phone up. Swiped the screen open. No app notifications. No one to communicate with me. Not even a dumb automated political message.

Maybe I should text someone. Just to see a real notification light, break the illusion.

But who would reply? Who would care?

This was my life now. I had pushed everyone away. I slipped my phone into my pocket to hide the silence from myself.

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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.