On my way into the kitchen to make breakfast, I tripped over something soft and squishy. When I flipped on the a light, there was a teddy bear, sitting in the doorway. Facing the fridge.

I had no kids and owned no teddy bears.

Following the teddy’s gaze to the fridge, I found words spelled out with my letter magnets. Two words.

‘He’s coming.’

I woke up. I had my dream journal with me in bed. Pen in my hand. Half asleep, I had written two words.

‘He’s coming.’

In the dark morning outside, a tapping started on my window.

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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.