I heard their cries about me from the town square as I threw my belongings together in a sack.

“She laughs too loud.”

“Reads so much.”

“She’s way too smart.”

“Must be demonic possession.”

Soon it would be the torches and the pitchforks. Once they worked themselves into a frenzy, there’d be no stopping them. A bag of rocks tied to my feet in the river to see if I floated. Or just a good old burning.

The way they did my mom.

I slipped out the back window and vanished into the woods. Better luck in the next town.

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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.