What Happened Was

In Katharine Haake’s new eco-fable, What Happened Was, emissaries from the post-world return to us with accounts of a future that spools itself out because we’re not paying attention. In it, everything looks a lot like now, only a little different. Intimate, precarious, often beguiling, sometimes hilarious, and never free of political context, these reports are haunted by loss. Whether parts of the body or children in trees, things disappear in this world without warning or sense as everything fades toward oblivion and dead parents taunt from the grave: What made you think you were so special it wouldn’t happen to you?