
My cryptid horror story No Bones, Just Skin has been published in the Children of the Dead: Lost Lullabies anthology by Wicked Shadow Press. It’s about a brother and sister who have a terrifying encounter with an abúhukü, a rainforest demon known for dissolving the bones of its prey and leaving the empty skin behind.
Content warning: mild gore“What happened to him?” Manuel asked. The filthy soccer ball he had been dribbling along the jungle floor rolled to a stop in a mud puddle on the side of the trail, suddenly forgotten.
Manuel’s older sister, Liliana, stood next to him, looking up at the body hanging high in the tree overhead. The carcass was little more than a shriveled husk of a man, a wrinkled bag of skin draped boneless and formless across the jungle’s dense lattice of vines and branches. It was almost as if the man had been turned into a garment, as if someone had slit him down the back, extracted his skeleton, then tossed him carelessly into the tree like an old bathrobe.

