Katy Wimhurst, "An Orchid in My Belly Button"

 

Katy Wimhurst is a writer and visual poet. She has had three collections of short stories published — An Orchid in My Belly Button (Elsewhen Press, 2025), Snapshots of the Apocalypse (Fly on the Wall Press, 2022) and Let Them Float (Alien Buddha Press, 2023). Her fiction has been published in numerous magazines and anthologies including The Guardian, Writers’ Forum, Cafe Irreal, Kaleidotrope, and ShooterLit. Her first book of visual poems, Fifty-One Trillion Bits, was published by Trickhouse Press (2023). She occasionally writes literary essays on speculative fiction and interviews writers for 3AM Magazine. Her website is here. She is housebound with the illness M.E.

About An Orchid in My Belly Button
These short stories savour the surreal, flirt with magical realism, dabble with dystopia. A boy sees the ghosts of dead crabs. A girl with a fox tail is bullied. A disenchanted woman sprouts orchids from her belly button. Fashion models pursue the trend of having plants as hair. Electronic goods amassing all over London herald an apocalypse. Darkness and wonder, the strange and the ordinary, interweave to offer an environmental and social portrait of our times. Guaranteed to evoke a response, whether a giggle, a gasp, or a nervous gulp, these stories will stay with you, enriching your perception of the world.

Surreal, absurdist, magical realist: Katy Wimhurst writes speculative fiction that meditates on our reality. Although bleak themes are examined – dystopian futures, the climate crisis, bullying – a quirky imagination and wry humour lift the tales above the ‘realm of grim.’

An Orchid in My Belly Button is published by Elsewhen Press. More about it can be found on the publisher’s website here. An extract from one story is below.

From An Orchid in My Belly Button, by Katy Wimhurst

Snow on Snow

Snow flutters down in her living room, even though the windows are closed. She blinks. The flakes pattern the carpet into white lace and dust the top of her cacti collection. She can’t afford to heat the flat, so she puts on a woolly hat and curls up on the sofa, tugging a tartan blanket around her. She gazes at the icy miracle. How remarkable! 

When the snow stops before bedtime, she makes hot chocolate and changes into fleece pyjamas. Snuggling under the covers with a hot water bottle, she remembers camping in the garden for a week one December when she was a teenager, sixty years ago; she preferred the quiet, cold tent to the heated rows of her parents. Before she drops off to sleep, the icy tingle on her face tells her more flakes are falling. 

She awakes to a flat carpeted in snow, which reaches a few centimetres up the skirting boards and collects footprints when she crunches over it. Nature has adorned the place festively, even if she hasn’t bothered to put decorations up. She puts on warm clothes, a woolly hat, mittens, a jacket, and boots. Her bones are chilly, but the magic of this arctic interior lifts her spirit. 

Hot porridge warms her. Then, using a pastry brush, she flicks the snow off her cacti collection—the Fairy Castles, Old Ladies, Moons, Stars, Bunny Ears, and Golden Barrels. Her ex-husband said they were like her, prickly but resilient. Worried about what the cold might do to the plants, she wraps strips of hessian around their bases, pricking her finger twice.

With a duster, she wipes the snow off a photo on the wall, revealing her niece and two great nieces in Montreal, Canada; so far away. She doesn’t bother wiping the one of her nephew and his family outside Tate Modern, London. 

Katy Wimhurst, "Let Them Float"

Katy Wimhurst’s first collection of short stories was Snapshots of the Apocalypse (Fly on the Wall Press, 2022) and her new collection is Let Them Float (Alien Buddha Press, 2023). Her fiction has been published in numerous magazines and anthologies, including The Guardian, Writers’ Forum, Cafe Irreal, Kaleidotrope, and ShooterLit. Her first book of visual poems, Fifty-One Trillion Bits, was published by Trickhouse Press (2023). She interviews writers for 3AM Magazine. She blogs here. She is housebound with the illness M.E. @Sylphsea on Twitter

About Let Them Float
In the short stories in Let Them Float, Katy Wimhurst creates off-kilter worlds that illuminate our own. Apocalyptic rabbits invade a town. People overwhelmed by their lives float above an urban park. A woman turns transparent after a virus. The playful lenses of magical realism and surrealism are used to explore physical and mental illness and our fragile environment. Thought-provoking fiction with a good dose of whimsy. More can be found out about the book here. You can read an excerpt from the book below. 

From Let Them Float, by Katy Wimhurst

Let Them Float

It was like any walk to work through Castle Park until something tugged at Isla’s attention. She halted, cupping her hand to her mouth. Jeez.

A woman was floating upright above a leafy oak tree. Her slender arms were opened a little on each side, like a half-baked ballet pose. She wore blue jeans and a matching jacket, and she stared skyward blankly, her chin tilted up. Suspended in the air, she resembled a figure from a Chagall painting or a lost angel in denim. What was she doing up there?

Would this be like the epidemic of Fainters in town, from a couple of years back? Or a few years before that, the Hornies, the group of teenagers who sprouted goat’s horns on their heads – Isla’s nephew, Hamish, aged five at the time, loved those. 

From where Isla stood, the floating woman looked twenty-something. Does she have any children? A question Isla asked herself about many strangers. She reached for her neck scarf and absent-mindedly rubbed its silky material between her thumb and forefinger. Three men ahead of her had stopped, one filming the woman on his phone. Isla would have loved to linger and watch, but another busy day at work awaited. She tore herself away.

In the sunlight, the wrought-iron park gates threw shadows like pretty lattices onto St Peter’s Street. Isla’s office was in a glass-fronted building halfway down this road. In the foyer, the sign above Reception read: Orizone: Compliments for Condiments. She wrote copy for a marketing company specialising in foods such as chutneys and pickles; hardly a dream job. Her boyfriend, Gaitlin, jokingly called her the ‘chutney champion.’ 

Kylie, the smiley receptionist with a ginger bob, greeted her. 

‘Heard about the floating woman?’ asked Isla.

‘Pardon?’ Kylie’s brow creased as Isla explained. ‘I’m definitely going to have a nosey at lunchtime. What’s that all about?’

‘Wish I knew.’ Isla glanced at Kylie’s telephone. ‘Any calls for me?’

Kylie’s brows rose. ‘That Mr Lancaster again. I told him to try in half an hour.’

A difficult client, Isla’s heart plummeted.

Sunlight sluiced through the floor-to-ceiling windows in the open-plan office. As ever, Isla was the earliest to arrive. She put her velvet jacket on the back of her chair while looking at a silver-framed photo on her desk. It showed her nephew in a school uniform, smiling in his sweet, bashful way. All the other women her age here had photos of their own kids on display. Isla switched on her desktop and turned her attention to her emails. Four already from Mr Lancaster. Oh, spare me. She clicked on his first one and tried to concentrate, but her mind harked back to the floating woman.

Katy Wimhurst, "Snapshots of the Apocalypse"

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 ...