Spooktober 2022 Day 24: Bone

Content warning: death mention

Piles of bones kept appearing on my doorstep. Not animal bones, either, but people bones. 

At first, I’d thought the bones a threat. I lived alone and far away, after all. A perfect target for the ire of nearby villagers. Not one to be cowed, I’d nailed skull and rib cage to the walls of my house. 

But you’d continued bringing them. 

Bones only appeared with the news of a local’s death. I suspect you’d clean them, but wanted more memorial than mere burial. 

So I kept nailing them up. And between us, we built a shrine to the dead.

I’d beat you.

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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.


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