Deep in the woods, I built a mound of dirt and twigs and pinecones, an altar upon which to make my sacrifice. Packed together with my bare hands, mud squeezed cool and alive between my fingers, under my nails.

Rain started drizzling through whispering pine needles. I laid my phone down upon a bed of dry leaves on the altar. Fire from my lighter caught on the leaves with a crackle. Plastic and metal began to melt. The glass screen cracked.

Soon the phone melted down to a black lump. All my contacts, all my apps, sacrificed.

For my freedom.

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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.