Content warning: body horror
You just wanted to start over, you said. Everyone who comes to me always does. To escape bad relationships, bad debt, bad choices.
A blank slate.
“Wipe my identity,” you’d told me.
But then you hadn’t followed up with, “Give me something new.”
I paused, assessing you. In one hand, I held the delicate mask of your visage. My other hand hovered above the face of a young woman I’d help escape a stalker. “Any special requests?”
Your blank face returned my regard. You had no mouth to reply, but you shook your head. This is exactly what I need.
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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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