Content warning: implied murder, corpse mention

As far as you were concerned, burial didn’t count if it didn’t involve dirt. Yet we’d drifted far from land during our fight over who would captain this ship. And I didn’t have anywhere else to put your corpse when I won.

I think I won, anyway.

It’s just that you’ve taken to following the boat’s shadow, walking along the ocean floor with glowing eyes trained on me above. I can’t outpace you. You can’t swim.

I’m afraid to enter water shallower than six feet.

So I’m headed out to deeper seas. Hopefully, the crushing pressure will be burial enough.

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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.