Content warning: sharp objects mention

When you found me at the flea market, you had on one of those ridiculous shoulder-mounted cameras. You probably uploaded your little cheap-market excursions online. Showing off your savviness. Your cleverness.

From my package, you read aloud, “Comes with knives.” Then you flipped me over, looking for the disclosed knives. “Hey, this one’s missing pieces,” you continued to the proprietor. “Can I get a discount?”

You sounded pretty smug when you walked away with a deal. And me.

My packaging hadn’t lied, though. I just had a trick of keeping my knives somewhere hidden.

Embedded like teeth, inside my mouth.

Thanks for reading!

Subscribe for new stories, sneak peeks, book reviews, and updates delivered to your inbox and social feeds.

Links

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.