Belly-Heart

In a small survivalist commune isolated by sea, a woman named Stars spends her days on the parts of the island the gulls haven’t claimed. She plucks the wild capers from their brambles on The High Hills, coaxes crops out of not much good soil, and swims to The Reef with a spear to fish. If there’s time, she lies in the shade with her sister-by-blood, Moon. Everyone has a role, and everything is familiar, and then change blows in with the salted wind.

When Alpha, the group leader, invites newcomers from the mainland to join them on the isolotto, Stars' way of life is upheaved. Resources leak like water through fingers, rules bend and break, and the group's harmony that once sounded like bee-hum becomes gull-screech. As Stars seeks answers, she finds only more questions. Perhaps the isolotto was never really the haven that it appeared to be? Perhaps lies have been scratched so deep under the soil that the stones no longer sing of them?

This story is a slow opening of the eyes as Stars reevaluates what her gut is telling her amidst the secrets that drench her home. Belly-Heart explores the reliability of intuition and the dystopian elements of our own society. It is a visceral and reflective psychological exploration for adult readers with echoes of the post-apocolyptic genre. A slow-burn that comes crashing down.

Belly-Heart was developed at Faber Academy with Emily Bitto and Sophie Cunningham, then redrafted during a Wheeler Centre Hot Desk Fellowship. Excerpts were presented at The Emerging Writers' Festival 2023 and The Wheeler Centre's Next Big Thing 2023.