“Don’t move,” mommy whispered.

We stood together in the middle of our cornfield. We had our arms stretched out in a T-pose, resting along poles lashed together like a cross. The same as the poles that held up the scarecrows dotting the field around us. We each held bundles of straw or twigs.

“We’re being scarecrows again?” I asked.

“Yes, again. Shhh…”

As the sun vanished below the horizon, the scarecrows slipped off their poles and crept past, ignoring us as they advanced on our empty house. Last year, when they surprised us, they got daddy.

Thanks for reading!

Subscribe for new stories, sneak peeks, book reviews, and updates delivered to your inbox and social feeds.

Links

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.