My psychological horror story A Perfect Fit has been accepted by The Literary Hatchet by PearTree Press. It’s about a middle-aged woman who will do anything to maintain her youthful appearance.

I stepped back to admire Poppy’s frame, noting the slight dimpling of cellulite visible on her hips and the fine vertical lines along the top edge of her upper lip. The ghost of a gray hair peeked out from behind the bangs she had added to hide her creased forehead.

“Poppy! Look at you!” I gushed. “How are you so perfect?”

My short horror story Things Are Looking Up has been accepted by Exquisite Death. After a man and his wife are in a fatal car accident, the man decides he will do anything to see his wife one more time. Even if he has to dig.

My weird fiction story The Salt Circle has been accepted in the Howl anthology by Graveside Press. It’s a like a werewolf story, but with slugs. Yeah.

She waved her tissue with a dismissive gesture. “It’s just a little salt.”

“I just don’t want you to get hurt,” Linda said, wiping at her nose with a soggy, crumpled tissue. “I’m worried about you.”

I extended my eye stalks toward her, giving her what I hoped was a look of indignation. I couldn’t believe she was trying to spin it like it was my fault. “If you didn’t want me to get hurt, maybe you shouldn’t have been so quick to deploy the chemical weapons.”

My dark sci-fi drabble Final Notice has been accepted by 100-Foot Crow. It’s about what happens when you forget to make the payments on your self-driving car.

The first time I tried Chauffeur, it felt like magic. I watched in awe as it effortlessly piloted my car through traffic, the driver’s seat empty. Naturally, I signed up. $199 per month. I thought I could afford it.

I was wrong.

Two more of my stories—Matches and A Piece of the Sky—have been accepted by the Lunatics Radio Hour podcast. These will be my fourth and fifth stories to appear on the show. Their recent production of A Sinking Feeling was exceptional, so I’m looking forward to hearing what they do with the next ones.

• Matches is a dark(er) retelling of The Little Match Girl by Hans Christian Anderson. This will be the first-ever audio production of this story.
• A Piece of the Sky is told through the testimony of the surviving member of a two-person asteroid mining crew that picked up an unfortunate souvenir during their expedition.

My modern dark fantasy story Dragonsbreath has been accepted into Spectacular, Spectacular! An Anthology of Circensian Horror, a collection of circus-themed tales of terror. It’s the story of a teen forced to wear a fireproof mask to protect himself and others from a power he can’t control.

The woman’s head lurched forward as her SUV slowed to a jarring stop, its bumper only inches from the police car parked sideways across her lane. Half a dozen emergency vehicles crowded the street ahead of her. There were police cars. Fire trucks. An ambulance.

The woman watched with mounting horror as a pair of paramedics lifted a gurney out of the ambulance and began wheeling it up the driveway of a nearby house.

Her house.

My psychological horror story A Perfect Fit has been accepted into Mono No Aware by Culture Cult Press, an anthology about the fleeting nature of beauty. It’s the story of a middle-aged woman who will do anything to maintain her youthful appearance.

I stepped back to admire Poppy’s frame, noting the slight swelling of her hips and the fine vertical lines above her upper lip. The ghost of a gray hair peeked out from the bangs she had added to hide her creased forehead.

“Poppy! Look at you!” I gushed. “How are you so perfect?”

Two of my stories—Me, a Hero and Leftovers—have been accepted by the Lunatics Radio Hour podcast. Their recent production of A Sinking Feeling was exceptional, so I’m looking forward to hearing what they do with the next two.

• Me, a Hero is about a man who joins the search for a missing girl in hopes of making an appearance on the local evening news.
• Leftovers is about an elderly woman living in a rapidly-declining urban neighborhood who subsists on an unconventional recipe from the old world.

My historical horror story Breathtaking has been accepted the The Taborian. Set in 1930s Oklahoma during the Dust Bowl, it tells the story of a young girl and her brother who see a mysterious woman in white screaming outside their house during a dust storm.

The dust storms were getting worse.

People in town called them “black blizzards.” That’s exactly what they were like, too, like snowstorms made of soot and ash. One minute, the sky would be as clear as glass. The next minute, the dust would billow up so high that it blocked out the sun. It would go from noon to midnight just like that, right in the middle of the day. The wind would pick up out of nowhere, first whistling, then moaning, then shrieking.

“Like a banshee,” was how Papa called it. “Man, listen to that,” he would say. “Wind’s screaming like a banshee.”

My dark fantasy story It’s What’s Inside That Counts has been accepted by Space Squid. It’s about a young girl who dissects a pig in science class, only to discover something unexpected inside.

I didn’t know how I’d react to the dissection. I couldn’t imagine poking around in a dead pig’s guts. I wondered how they would feel. Would they be squishy and warm, like spaghetti? Or cold and jiggly, like Jello? My stomach turned at the thought.

I was definitely gonna barf.