On day five after my parents took away my depression medication, I sat in class staring listlessly. Everything my teacher said about the lesson slammed against the wall in my brain blocking out my will. I heard none of it. Cared even less.

Upon the inside of my arm, I copied out fragments of sigils from a library book. Piecing them together to say what I needed.

I am free from depression and anxiety attacks.

Blowing the ink dry, I hoped this worked. If it didn’t, something else would have to give. I was afraid that something would be me.

Note: this story is not based on the writer’s experience.

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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.