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I had mostly rotted away by the time you found me fallen in the apartment next door.

I couldn’t guess why you knocked yourself instead of calling the manager. You never really responded to my greetings or attempts to chat. Like maybe you didn’t like me.

I couldn’t bear that.

When you knocked, the unlatched door swung open. You crept inside. Upon finding me, your shoulders slumped.

“You’re rotting on the floor now?” you asked.

I said, “Is that why you don’t like me? Because I rot?”

“We’re fine, you’re just over dramatic. Now would you get off the floor?”

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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.