Spooktober 2022 Day 4: Guise

Content warning: on-page death

In the guise of your front door, I awaited your return home.

For weeks, I’d lurked there. You’d turned my limb shaped like your doorknob, not noticing the slight give to the bronze. You’d hung your Christmas wreath on the red door of my tongue, missing my fetid breath.

You’d missed my eye watching you from within the peephole.

But tonight, you staggered up the porch, tipsy with New Year cheer. Full of delicious, fermented chemicals.

My favorite.

Unable to contain myself anymore, I draped my enormous tongue over you and slurped you right up.

Cheers to a new year.

Thanks for reading!

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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.


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