With its catastrophe flicks, zombie outbreaks, raging kaiju, and sharks of unusual size, Hollywood sells an apocalypse bristling with frenetic promise: stories told at breakneck pace, punctuated with do-or-die moments, noble sacrifices, and glimmers of resilience. But disaster is always domestic, mundane—a study in the simple yet strange art of making it from one day to the next.

This is the position staked by Katharine Haake’s What Happened Was, in a series of eco-fables that play out across the ruined neighborhoods, toxic landscapes, and ravaged fields of many possible futures. A neighborhood holds out against the arrival of ravenous, shapeless creatures who consume everything in sight, until the creatures devour the last of their worldly possessions. A child commits a cardinal sin: repurposing a precious milk jar as a habitat for cicadas, and thereby breaching the fragile membrane between what’s allowed to live indoors and outdoors. The appearance of a solitary flower on a barren site reveals the sensations—and even the very words—that dissipate in the aftermath of scarcity, like a hint of perfume whisked off by the breeze.

These are only a few of the possible futures—dubbed the “postworld”—in Haake’s What Happened Was. These realities are sutured with threads plucked from the real and precarious present—the possible extinction of megafauna like tigers and elephants, wars largely ignored by apathetic publics, television news, and droughts and scarcity that spur Haake’s characters to crave the lost sweetness of citrus.

However, the true system shock of Haake’s postworld stems not from these losses but from her characters’ ready acquiescence to the rough conditions of these parallel realities. “After a while,” the narrator admits, “it started to seem that this was the way things had always been.” During the advent of any new catastrophe, “there’s a difference between being in the thrall of a disaster and being in its maw.” Still, the prologue indicts us all—“our cheerful nature and our firm belief in progress”—for catapulting us towards cataclysms of our own making.

While the prologue signposts the dangers of complacency and complicity, the collection’s two main sections hint at the destinations that could await us. The first section gathers accounts of the multiversal postworld from a series of anonymous “emissaries,” the people who persist in the uncanny places that have survived the end of the world. The second section, “Mewl,” is a stand-alone story in three parts, told in reverse, as a woman meditates on the mass disappearances that left her alone and disconnected in a world that seems to glitch in and out of existence around her. Stuck in an out-of-time space that she’s called the “interregnum,” the woman, her husband, and the mewling girl they’ve adopted follow an unclear map scrawled on a postcard. The woman undertakes this journey, as nonchalant as any other postworld survivor:

So that’s how we start, walking down the road, as if it’s the most natural thing in the world, the girl first, then you, then me. Except for the ash and the leaves here and there that drift through the air without ever reaching the ground, things seem pretty much the same, only a little bit different. Inside the houses, animals watch us go, paws at the windows, tongues slack in their jaws, but are their eyes soft and friendly or vicious and snarly? Do they smell sour and rank, or of a strange and earthy musk we wish we might have known?

Haake’s eco-fables reside in the timeless space of fairy and folktales, a “once upon a time” in which everything is just a smidge off-kilter. That (and Haake’s spare yet rhythmic prose) sharpen these relentlessly modern and soberly whimsical stories, as they issue caution after caution about complacency about environmental crises.

It’s no surprise, then, that these eco-fables of the postworld build on the lessons of fairy tales: they invoke bugbears and threats as a last-minute, red-flag warning against calamity. In “Account E,” a single parent speaks on behalf of an alarmed neighborhood. The television news warns about remote threats and hazards. The narrator confesses that the parents in the community had fixated on those lurid stories while failing to notice the “glistening,” a sinister ooze that has come for their children. Only after the first child dies in a “gurgling slurp” with a “furtive pop,” do the parents pause to consider the consequences of their inaction: “For once, we turned our televisions off to consider what was happening just outside, our own children trapped in the green trees over there and all that nothing in between.”

Between “Emissaries of the Postworld” and “Mewl,” Haake curates a catalog of all we stand to lose if present environmental and human rights crises remain unresolved. At stake are not simply nonhuman animals or the joy of a just-ripe orange. Family bonds are among the first casualties of the postworld. In “Account N,” physical disabilities and abnormalities—like vanishing facial features—stir families to reject kith and kin, in a clear parable of modern society’s obsession with able-bodiedness. In this account, the narrator’s family exiles her father when his mouth disappears, leaving him incapable of speech. Even the narrator’s childhood best friend—a conventionally beautiful girl who “came into the world missing a part, although in other respects she was perfect”—is spared from social and familial ostracization.

Language too withers on the vine. Words like flower, the narrator of “Account F” confides, “didn’t slide off the tongue anymore, not like fortitude and perseverance, not like grit.” The narrator of “Mewl” and her partner similarly can’t communicate with the stray girl they take in. The child speaks in a muddle, but startles the couple with the occasional utterance of a legible word. While making coffee one morning, the adults hear the child say “cream,” a word that sets off a fount of words, known and unknown: “this once mewling mute of a girl, spinning words out from that one word ‘cream,’ some recognizable […], others not, hopping all the while up and down [..] as if trying to tell us something important.”

Readers expecting a grim zombie survivor story or the pioneer ethic of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road should be warned: nothing in this anthology of tiny calamities permits basking in the warmth of our current blockbuster genres. In their rejection of these commercial plotlines, these eco-fables suggest that such shopworn approaches to the short story and the novel are no longer up to the task of making sense of the world. Though it’s one of the oldest forms around, Haake’s book suggests that the fable is better suited to that task.

But there is comfort to be found in these pages too—like the small mercy that life does manage to go on, even after the worst has come to pass. It’s the same mercy that Elizabeth Bishop highlights in her poem “One Art,” when she exhorts us to master the art of losing by writing our losses like disaster. That’s what Haake does in What Happened Was, in fabricating a postworld that’s lush and unsettling yet eerily familiar, with all the mystery, whimsy, and fantasy of fable.

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Katharine Haake is the author of the eco-dystopian science fiction fable, The Time of Quarantine, the California hybrid prose lyric, That Water, Those Rocks, and three collections of stories. Her work has appeared broadly and been recognized as distinguished by Best American Fiction and Best American Essays, among others. She is a professor of creative writing at California State University, Northridge.

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Patrick Thomas Henry is the author of Practice for Becoming a Ghost: Stories (Susquehanna University Press, 2024). He is also the author of The Work of the Living: Modernism, the Artist-Critic, and the Public Craft of Criticism (Clemson University Press, 2024). His work has appeared in West Branch online, Carolina Quarterly, Lake Effect, Passages North, and many other journals. He is an assistant professor of creative writing at the University of North Dakota, and he is the creative writing editor for Modern Language Studies. Find him on Twitter and Instagram @Patrick_T_Henry or online at patrickthomashenry.com.