Katy Wimhurst’s first collection of short stories, Snapshots of the Apocalypse, is published by Fly on the Wall Press. Her short fiction has appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies including The Guardian, Shooterlit, Cafe Irreal, Ouen Press, Fabula Press, and Magic Oxygen Literary Prize. Her visual poetry has been published in The Babel Tower, 3am, Ric Journal, Steel Incisors, Trickhouse Press, and others. She studied social anthropology (and Mexican Surrealism at postgraduate level) and has worked in teaching and publishing. She lives by a pretty river, adores trees, and suffers from the neuroimmune illness M.E. Her website is here.
About Snapshots of the Apocalypse
In these dark, witty short stories, Katy Wimhurst creates off-kilter worlds which illuminate our own. Here, knitting might cancel Armageddon. A winged being yearns to be an archaeologist. Readers are sucked into a post-apocalyptic London where the different rains are named after former politicians. An enchanted garden grows in a rented flat. Magical realism meets dystopia, with a refreshing twist.
More about Snapshots of the Apocalypse can be found on the publisher’s website here. Below, you can read an excerpt from one of the stories.
From Snapshots of the Apocalypse, by Katy Wimhurst
Min despised the Tate Art and Refuge Centre. It contained little art and more refuse than refuge. She’d been approached by pimps in the café there, had witnessed fist-fights over chocolate, and had once seen an artwork used as a frisbee. But today, staring at the empty food cupboard in her squat, she knew she’d have to go there if she wanted to eat.
“Shit,” she muttered, slamming the cupboard door.
Cursing the guy who’d yet again failed to deliver the bootleg goods, Min grabbed her bag and slung on her black PVC cape and beret. She then padlocked her squat’s front door and marched down the long staircase.
On the ground floor, the sign on the wall read: THE ROYAL COLLEGE OF URGEONS. If anyone asked ‘what she did’ these days, she said she was an ‘urgeon.’ A reasonable word, she thought, for how she kept urging herself on despite the relentless crap around – and indeed within – her. Fortunately, few asked her ‘profession’ these days. Had it really taken an apocalyptic world to end small talk?
The former Reception area was dusted with cobwebs, its blue carpet muddy with footprints. Min still recalled her first visit to this place years ago as a medical student, but she tried not to think of the past. That was a different era, before the floods and chaos, and she’d never finished her studies, anyway. It’d been how she’d known about this place though, and why she’d come here to hide when her flat near Tottenham Court Road had burnt down in a riot ...
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