Content warning: food mention

Your parents had dismissed the old ways by the time I died, so I was surprised to find the hallowed place you’d built for me in one of the stubbly fields.

In the darkening evening, you lit a small pile of twigs, reminiscent of a home hearth. Upon a tiny stone altar, you laid all your supper.

And waited.

Skipping the boiled carrots, I started with the honey cake. Too long since I’d tasted dessert.

As the food disappeared, your eyes widened. “Gee-gee?”

Pleased, I patted your head. Though you couldn’t hear me, I whispered, “See you next year, kiddo.”

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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.