“Smile,” you said. “People will wonder what you’re up to.”

So I smiled. I couldn’t not. Your voice cursed my very bones with an alien desire to make you happy. If you wanted my smile, you could have it. Though inside I seethed with fury.

You never thought to wonder what I was up to, gazing at me in the closet where you had locked me up. Never read the formulas and designs I wrote on the walls. Planning your fall.

Through my smile, I recited my own curse. For your silence.

For your silence, I traded my hated smile.

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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.