Content warning: implied murder

Your storm windows stood no chance of protecting you, even though you’d had them specially made from steel. Readying for the storm you knew would come.

I watched you install them. And you felt me watching, I know. You prepared and I lurked. Waiting for atmospheric turbulence. Wind shear. Moisture.

Cold air aloft.

When heavy clouds glinted green, you scurried indoors.

Within that green heart, I tossed ice crystals up and they fell down, over and over, each cycle growing seeds into hail. Big as your fist. Big as your head.

Big as you.

And then, I let them fall.

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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.