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You committed thirteen taboos in a row as if begging for a lifetime of bad luck. The usuals everyone knows about, of course. Mirror. Umbrella. Ladder. Even some superstitions unfamiliar to you. Horseshoe. Scissors. Moonlit water.

Then you just sat. Waiting.

I squinted, guessing at your game. You’d done your research, but to what end?

You hadn’t quite committed thirteen taboos, though. So not enough for me to snatch you up. That thirteenth itched at me.

Finally, I appeared before you.

“Lady Doom,” you said, “come to take me away?”

“No.” I sighed. “Black cats don’t count. They’re not unlucky.”

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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.