Content warning: blood mention

The moment my skin tore and blood oozed up within the cut, I knew you would hunt me.

How anyone could be expected not to bleed, I didn’t know. But our kin always told us, No blood outside. The hunter will come. Not in that joking way adults talked about monsters. But dead serious.

And yet, I bled. Outside.

But I would not just roll over. I left at once, squeezing more blood out on my journey. And more. Leaving a trail of blood drops away from my home.

When my wound scabbed over, I’d circle back.

I’d beat 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.