Offbeat short stories that explore our fragile world

These 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 due for release from Elsewhen Press 28th February 2025, you can find out more by click here!

Cover Artist: Alison Buck

Alison is a figurative and landscape artist and has exhibited and sold paintings of various styles throughout her career. Latterly she has increasingly been working on larger canvases, focusing on the natural world, trying to capture the transient and transforming effects of light and movement within landscapes. For over twenty years she has also been working as a commercial graphic designer, running a design studio and producing graphics and artwork for corporate clients, book covers and illustrations. Alison is also an accomplished author.

British Fantasy Society Best Artist Award Nominee 2022

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Author: Katy Wimhurst

Katy Wimhurst is a disabled writer who pens short stories about apocalyptic rabbits, cosmic vacuum cleaners, people turning into mushrooms, knitting to oblivion, existential shrugs, and worlds in which chocolate is illegal. Her fiction has allegedly been called ‘dark, witty and magical’, sometimes even ‘absurdist’. Before discovering the silvery steps that led to Elsewhen Press, she had two books of (magical realist / dystopian) short fiction published, Snapshots of the Apocalypse (Fly on the Wall Press) and Let Them Float (Alien Buddha Press). She occasionally writes articles about magical realism or speculative fiction. In a very past life, she might have studied for a PhD on Mexican surrealism.

She was born in ████ 2025 and now lives near a pretty river in eastern UK. She is tremendously grateful for trees, seahorses, clouds, chocolate, kindness, and Studio Ghibli films. She isn’t appreciative of the illness M.E. which she has had for way too long and is why she has to write fiction on an iPad while lying down. She would like to be reincarnated as a cumulus cloud or one of Wes Anderson’s dreams.

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Author’s comment on the cover and the book:

‘An Orchid in My Belly Button’, the titular short story, served as inspiration for the female figure on the cover by artist Alison Buck. In this story, a woman starts to sprout plants from her body as a response to life’s frustrations, which include student debt, meaningless work and bad boyfriends. Most of my fiction takes place in our world (or one like it) but uses magical elements or quirky imagery to embellish or reflect on this. Nature and the environment are common themes in the speculative short stories in An Orchid in My Belly Button.

An Orchid in my Belly Button is due for release from Elsewhen Press 28th February 2025, you can find out more by click here!