Content warning: spider mention

A single long cobweb hung from the ceiling where I’d lowered myself down at your side. It swayed in a breeze blowing through the door you’d left open in your haste to flee. My cobweb reached almost to the tuffet where you’d sat, but didn’t quite reach.

You’d knocked me flying when you’d jumped up.

Dizzy, I righted myself next to your spilled bowl of whey. I hadn’t wanted you or your food. Just to reach the floor, where my food lived.

Uncertain whether you were the type to return with a broom, I scuttled away to the nearest baseboard.

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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.