Seven mirrors in the house and I smashed every one to pieces when you left me. Seven times seven equals forty-nine years of bad luck. Worth it to never see your face look back at me again.

You wanted to ‘be your own person.’ To ‘do things for yourself for once.’ But what about me? Together from the womb, you and I. My bad luck that you abandoned me.

Crying and gasping amidst the wreckage of the mirrors around me, I grasped the iron crowbar with shaking hands, lifting it one last time. Just one more mirror to destroy.

You.

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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.