Content warning: none apply

The cemetery hasn’t had a volunteer headstone cleaner in a long time, so I’m surprised to see you.

You make your way over to my grave, a plastic bucket dangling from your hand, this rattling with the tools of your trade. Spray bottle, brushes. A pick. A scraper.

I’ve always enjoyed watching the process of headstone cleaning.

Crouching in the grass, you set to the quiet, rustling work of clearing grime from stone. But as you pick out my engraved death date, you pause.

You’ve seen what the others saw—a countdown.

One number ticks over.

Because I’m coming back.

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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.