Content warning: blood mention, implied murder

Every year, we skimmed off the top of your harvest. Taxes, we said. Easy enough to collect food for ourselves in the name of food for all without lifting a finger.

But who followed up on that yield distribution?

I should’ve realized you would.

You took your time. Let us ripen, before you arrived for a different harvest. A nighttime harvest. One no one would follow up on to find where we’d gone.

You left only stubble behind. A smear of blood here and there. Enough to fertilize the land for next time.

Because there would be more of us.

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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.