Content warning: implied child endangerment

To this day, I’m still looking for your soul. You lost it during that one game of hide and seek, remember? I don’t know what happened exactly, because you were hiding and I was seeking, and you broke cover before I found you.

But you came from the direction of that old barn where we weren’t supposed to play.

Though we’re grown now, I remember your empty gaze when you came back. You still look at me that way. Hollowed out. Empty. Hungry.

So I’m still looking for your soul. Because I think, if I don’t find it, mine’s next.

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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.