The cold had seeped deep into my bones by bath time. Shivering, I lit a fire beneath my oversized cauldron hanging from a metal hook driven deep into the brick above my hearth. Deep enough to hold my weight.

I started to melt the moment I settled into the bubbling water. My skin began to slough off. Floating around on the water’s surface like eerie bits of soup.

Revealing myself for the lizard-person I was.

I would have to reapply a new human skin, but that would come later. For now, basking in hot luxury, I hissed a contented sigh.

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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.