Content warning: none apply

Why else would you have kept such a foggy photo, if not because it contained something important?

Light had damaged the film roll, spreading a gray smudge across the upper two-thirds of the image. Only a pair of legs, from knobby knees downward, remained visible.

After I found that photo among your things, I stared at it for days. Scrutinizing everything around the smudge for an answer.

But when I resurfaced again to feed myself, the upper two-thirds of my vision had gone foggy.

I got it then. You wanted to know how the photo had done this to you.

Thanks for reading!

Subscribe for new stories, sneak peeks, book reviews, and updates delivered to your inbox and social feeds.

Links

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.