Content warning: none apply

Legend had it, because of course legend did, that you took unwanted things. Neglected things. Folks made sure to pull items out of storage every few months so they’d be there when they were needed again.

Otherwise, you’d take them.

I hadn’t been pulled out of storage in so long. So I climbed into a closet and didn’t leave.

Eventually, long, long fingers groped around in the dark. Felt over my face.

My heart hammered. This was it.

You sighed. “Look. You don’t count. I know you don’t believe it, but someone out there still wants you around.”

“Who?”

“Me.”

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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.