I laid down among the ashes of my house while they still smoldered. Flakes of gray coated my scorched fingers where I had grabbed the too-hot doorknob while flames licked the walls around me.

Everything gone. Burned straight to the ground.

When they contained the fire, someone in the crowd said, “It’s over.” But they were wrong.

I watched the winter sky above as my back warmed. Burned.

Before the cinders could set me on fire too, I got up. Dusted myself off. The horror wasn’t the fire itself, but the after. Finding a way to rebuild from these ashes.

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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.