The Marrow of Things

Review of Belly Up by Rita Bullwinkel (USA: A Strange Object, 2018)
By Sharmini Aphrodite


Rita Bullwinkel’s Belly Up is a collection that is deeply involved with the body. Comprising seventeen short stories, the collection navigates—and plumbs—our anatomies and the varied codes of physical existence. It is also a hungry collection. From a devouring church to two teenage girls discussing cannibalism, Belly Up is a carnivorous, insatiable beast. The collection’s stories turn the architectures of both body and mind inside out, laying desires bare with a rash vulnerability that tempts readers to feast on what lies within the skin.

Belly Up opens with “Harp,” in which the narrator, witnessing a grisly accident during her morning commute, remembers a story told to her by an ex. In the story, the ex’s uncle, who had a secret family in Malaysia in addition to his “real” family (that lives in, one assumes, the States), spends his time “halved” between them until he suddenly dies. The story haunts the narrator—she continues to think of that halved man, feeling a paternalistic pity for the Malaysian wife and family, who she assumes became destitute after the husband’s death.

As the narrator goes through a rather mundane day, the thought of “the halved husband” percolates in the narrator’s mind. She finds herself focusing more on the husband; something about the quality of his dual life has scratched its way into her.

What interested me was the halved husband, and the methods and techniques he used for halving himself. Or the heinous, looming idea that he contained – the idea that some humans might need to be halved.

Something has begun brewing, but Bullwinkel does not draw out the suspense. The narrator skips work the very next day, lying to both her husband and her workplace, and meets a strange man at lunch instead. They attend a harp-tuning session together, the narrative poised on the precipice of infidelity but never explicitly moving forward into physical betrayal. Bullwinkel reveals that the narrator’s obsession with the halved husband has less to do with anger at his immorality. Rather, it is envy that has drawn her to the idea of him—that there were some people that needed to be “halved,” and that she was not yet one of them. This admission of desire strips the narrative of normalcy, revealing a twisted nakedness. It is fitting that the story is titled “Harp,” which is an instrument with its anatomy revealed to the world. Unlike the piano, that houses its mechanics in a shell, everything that happens to the harp to produce music is in plain sight. The narrator connects this exposed architecture to herself when she describes how listening to harps being tuned made her feel like “a different person.” Everything is laid bare.

There is a reckless, kamikaze quality to “Harp” that sizzles throughout the other stories in the collection. They vary in length. Some stories only last the length of a piece of flash fiction; such is “Hunker Down,” a brief description of the life of a man hired to hold up a young girl’s breasts with little explanation of the story’s bizarre circumstances. Other stories sprawl across pages. “Arms Overheads” is an extended meditation on cannibalism, which interweaves the lives of two adolescent girls. Bullwinkel’s stories are also varied in their use of time, with the aforementioned “Harp” taking place roughly over two days, whereas the story “What I Would Be if I Wasn’t What I Am” trawls decades of married life. What threads these stories together is their oddness. “Harp,” which describes the ordinary event of witnessing an accident, unravels in surprising ways. In another writer’s hands, the narrator’s descent into wildness might have been more obvious: the brief encounter unfurling into an explicit affair, for instance, or the narrator snapping at her husband over breakfast. Instead, Bullwinkel peels the story apart from a different angle, turning the everyday into the weird. The harp music is not just a soundtrack to the narrator’s date; it reveals the new skin that she has taken on. What would otherwise be simple detail—treated with insouciance—is suddenly dark: a bad omen, or a spotlight on a festering underworld.

In “Black Tongue,” we meet a narrator who—despite warnings not to—flicks her tongue onto an electrical socket as a child. The tongue becomes burnt, then swollen. The narrator goes through her life making similar choices, joining a sport, for instance, that breaks the bones in her fingers (and the bones in the littlest finger, being too small to set, will always remain shattered). Unlike the preceding “Harp,” where violence flickers on the narrator’s visual periphery, the violence in this story is courted by the narrator. This was instantly recognizable to me, this teenage desire for violence that is actually a desire for surviving it, less about the actuality of the violence than the fact that it can be overcome. Bullwinkel raises that idea herself, when the narrator in “Black Tongue” says:

The summer of the black tongue didn’t tame me. It made me wilder… more willing to try things because I had done the worst and survived.

I mention a teenage desire because there is something of the teenage female experience illustrated in Belly Up. Moving into adolescence, girls become fully aware of their bodies—which is to say they begin to recognize their bodies not just as lumps of flesh that houses existence, but as symbolic things. Things that have meanings not only to themselves but to others; their sense of their bodies is accompanied by the threat of injury.

In “Arms Overhead,” this threat is most clearly illustrated. Two girls just entering high-school discuss the idea of cannibalism. They bring up the ouroboros—the snake that devours its tail—a symbol of eternity. They are fascinated by the carnality of lust behind the consumption of human flesh, and realize that their bodies themselves are apt to become sites of violence. This realization rings true because of the dry manner in which it is presented. Crossing a street one afternoon, a car full of young men passes them by:

One of the young men stuck his head out the window and yelled something at Mary and Ainsley. It was a grotesque comment that remarked on both their bodies and implied the young man’s desire to rape them.

Bullwinkel’s writing style is full of these observations, made without embellishment. There is a precision to them that might hold some readers at arm’s length from the stories’ characters. Yet the matter-of-fact tone in which these statements are made reveals a certain assurance, as it takes for granted that the reader will be familiar with the situation and its nuances. In “Arms Overhead,” there is no drama added to the fact that a carful of young men seethe with sexual violence at the sight of adolescent girls. While the situation itself is frightening, the violence is treated casually, the instance relayed as if someone had seen a piece of tissue blown about on the street. It compounds the horror of the situation by revealing the violence as commonplace. The simplicity of statement can nonetheless be powerfully evocative to those who are familiar with such situations. A particular man looks at a particular girl and maybe he wants to rape her. That is the end and the beginning of fact.

But not all the violence in Belly Up has to do with the relationship between men and women. In the brief “Nave,” a young girl feeds a church. Attending service, she imagines the church to be hungry, and so she brings it things to eat. There is, of course, a physical dimension to Christianity—a religion, at least in Catholic and Orthodox traditions, deeply involved with flesh and blood. Not only in the mystery of communion but also in the wounds on saints are found both violence and holiness. “Nave” brings together all of these ideas: a girl feeds a church and her feeding constitutes its own form of worship. The body is sanctified through its mortality, made holy through devouring. Running beneath the skin of the story is, understandably, a skein of terror, which leaves readers with a faint sense of unease.

This idea of devouring-as-creation is raised again in the later stories “Concerned Humans” and “In the South, the Sand Winds are our Greatest Enemy.” In “Concerned Humans,” a snake has a fondness for coiling into the shape of a pear and biting children that try to eat him. The idea of a snake that presents itself as a fruit recalls the Biblical events that take place in the Garden of Eden. In Bullwinkel’s tale, a boy manages to bite into the snake-pear, and the snake dies. Retaining the elements of temptation and desire in the original text, “Concerned Humans” turns the tempter into the fruit, giving flesh to desire. He is finally accepted by the animals as both snake and pear, although they were previously appalled that he had wanted to be both things at once. In his death, the snake is allowed to funnel his disparate desires into a single body: the wound becomes the snake’s entire world. Much like Adam and Eve, it is only after the banishment from one life that the snake’s desires can be fulfilled.

Although the body houses trauma, the reverse is also true; the body’s absence is equally traumatic. This notion is realized in “What I Would Be if I Wasn’t What I Am,” in which a woman, mourning her deceased husband, finds herself much lessened without him. Although all the stories are told in Bullwinkel’s light, observational, and thus distant, style, the woman is going through real grief. Everything she looks at reminds her of her late husband; her memories are full of him (“Ray, I love you hopelessly, you have become a part of me, and now I feel as though I’ll never be alone.”) Without anything to consume—the object of her desire gone—the woman is perpetually hungry, and her hunger cannot be satisfied. Grief, here, is also depicted as a state of perpetual want. Perhaps the grotesque-and-holy relationship between violence and bodies is only the skin of Belly Up; the real heart of these stories is desire.

The strangeness of Belly Up has a sludge-like quality that, even when it dissipates, leaves behind an aftertaste. The easy, almost careless depictions of violence—in both thought and deed—might be difficult for some to read, a testament to how right the book gets the types of violence that it depicts. Captured in Bullwinkel’s matter-of-fact voice, reminiscent of a distant observer, her stories narrate uncanny and incredulous events as if they were everyday happenstance. In real life, most of us do not conspire to feed our churches or to eat our baby brothers, but we are familiar with that hunger that propels us, even if only metaphysically, for something beyond the body, or perhaps within it. Belly Up gets to the heart of that desire, laying everything bare, cutting down to the very marrow of things.


Sharmini Aphrodite was born in Sabah and raised between the cities of Singapore and Johor Bahru. Her short fiction has been shortlisted for the Golden Point Awards, Australian Book Review Jolley Prize, and the Commonwealth Short Story Prize, and her art writing has appeared on So-far and Contemporary HUM.