Zecker’s Short Fantasy Story “The Antediluvians” was recognized and awarded this week by the Leominster Public Library. The full text of the story is free to read below.
The story is based on events that unfolded due to catastrophic floods ravaging the Central Massachusetts city a little over a year ago on September 11, 2023. Retaining walls failed, shores bulged at the influx of floodwaters, cars floated away, and entire foundations crumbled as rushing water pushed and pulled dirt and stone that hadn’t been uncovered for centuries. In 2024, the city is still trying to rebuild as the cogs of federal emergency management funds slowly turn toward a stronger future better prepared for the changing climate’s stinging bite of unpredictable weather.
This piece is based on a beloved flea market institution in the city. While the foundation of the building was severely damaged and washed away a significant portion, the shops reopened and are still humming with neighborhood bartering of thousands of items from hand-painted nature scenes on saws to thousands of records, tools, furniture, and lovingly curated cast-offs of generations of Leominsterites.
The question remains: What did this look like through the eyes of the various residents we share the city with at the speed of social media, and who do we decide to help when all seems lost?
The Antediluvians
By Garrett Zecker
There was a new chapter of the book on that night in September. We whispered it like whiskers and in the depths of the safety of our pockets amid the new dangers all around. The lightning. The endless people and cars, some floating down a river that didn’t exist the day before, and wouldn’t the day after. Water like we have never seen. A godly amount of water that even the cats and the foxes weren’t safe from, rushing past faster than a car. Rushing past, carrying cars.
The waters. Rotten waters, refuse, gasoline, building parts and sharp objects washing away so quickly, none of it where it was supposed to be, moving far from here.
It began long after we woke up on a claggy evening. The day was normal, awake in the evening when the security guard walked his route through our home – the big building. We usually hid pretty well. We kept some old blankets I stole in the night from the caged area in the basement shared among the anonymous people that showed up to work and to sell their musty old furniture and clothes. I didn’t even know what most of it was. We’d get lucky when new objects came in. There was always something new to inspect and smell. Old things. Wood and furniture much older than us and even older than the people it belonged to. They collected it here, and whenever they moved something or brought something new, we would find interesting things in that furniture.
A cockroach here, a dead rat there; honestly, we felt lucky. Me and my six children. We didn’t have much, but this place was our home and was always bustling with new surprises. We could eat like queens. The turnover of materials kept us finding new places to sleep in our massive space.
We’ve learned. We were always safe in the blankets where we slept during the daytime. Always look when crossing the road, always hide in blankets where no one can find you, there is a lot to eat in the cemetery, behind the pizza place, at the side of the road where someone didn’t look before crossing. My aunt unfortunately didn’t. This is in our book.
So, the normal day was another day of walking around and seeing what was going on in the building where we lived while avoiding people, monitoring if anything was dangerous or new. Today, there wasn’t. There wasn’t anyone there, as a matter of fact. That was unusual as the light went down outside. There was always one or two guards sweeping the building, but this silence was notable. An occasional skritch skritch of a mouse’s scurry. Dusk moved in slowly. Rain began to tap against the factory windowpane and as the humidity in the air increased, so did the volume in my nose increase the woody scent of the worn-out ancient furniture. But we were warm. We were close.
There was an owl once. In the rafters. Moving silently over plywood dividers. Hunting mice, and occasionally dropping one and forgetting. The owl only stayed a portion of the season. Someone was concerned. They shooed it into a wooden crate box and whisked it away somewhere. The mice came back and everything went back to the way it was. Safe again. Owls always scared us… There was a reason to stay away from owls. They aren’t ever what they seem. Their eyes, alien and vicious, calculating. This was in our book.
Night’s security sweep began later than ever.
The conical scan of the flashlight across the air was familiar, dust motes picking up the beam seeming solid as a birch trunk. Footsteps made their way across creaking floorboards. We were silent.
A brilliant flash of lightning tore through the massive room, illuminating the raindrops on the windowpanes, spidery webs of fencing dividing up the space, monstrous shadows projected everywhere of glassware, hand tools, plastic blister packs, and cellophane. Everything was terrifying, but at least we were dry and safe.
A massive thunder crack rattled the building. The man dropped his flashlight. It rolled under the fencing and toward us, just inches away. The light was terrible to look at, and I felt frozen for a moment. I jumped up and took my six babies with me around the corner, along the wall, to the other room with the garage where we could safely watch from a distance until the coast was clear. All in a moment.
“Goddamnit,” the man said in the dark. Another strange, booming crack rattled the building. Safely hiding behind the wall, I could hear the man rifle in the fabric of his pockets. Another light from a little black box, and he walked over to our blankets, got on all fours, and retrieved his flashlight by reaching under a dresser.
He shut off the second light and got on his knees. The flashlight swept the area. He saw our bedding.
“What?” he said to no one, pointing his light at our blankets. “That smell…” He motioned to investigate further, getting up on his feet, moving closer. He kicked a piece of the wood flooring. His light went to that, revealing several of the boards popped out of the floor. I had never seen the wood above the floor like that. He unsuccessfully tried to fit it back into where it came from, like it belonged in the new, perfectly sized hole. He took the little black box from his pocket and kept the flashlight pointed at the floor boards.
“Hey, it’s Jeff… Yeah, so I’m at Tilton Cook and the strangest thing, the floor boards randomly popped out of the floor. Over by the garage. They’re right where they were, so … yeah… Yeah, aside from like a weird nest that a cat pissed in or something it’s all good, no one here. This is fishy… Uh huh… Yeah…”
He listened. Another crack. Not thunder; bigger and closer. I lowered to the floor. I felt for my babies in the dark and could see them. Still six.
Another floorboard popped, launching itself into the air, jumping from some unseen tension. It hit the man on his leg.
“Damnit!”
Another pop, and another. The floorboards sprung around him into the air. The floor rumbled. They fell around him like broken branches in the wind.
“Chuck, I gotta get out of here. Something’s up. What should I do? Call the fire department?”
More rumble. He started walking toward us.
I had a way out near the garage and it was the only way we were getting out safely. I ran with the kids through the dark. The broken door we always used to get in was closed. Luckily, I saw the bottom of the garage door was crooked, as if it moved up a little or the floor somehow dropped lower. What was happening to the ground? I crawled under and peeked my head out.
Mayhem in another bright flash of lightning and thundering boom. Rain poured down. The shush of the brook that ran beneath the building us was louder than ever. I ran across the wet pavement rushing wildly with water that seemed to have nowhere to go. I jumped and slid under a truck to hide. It was always parked there, so I knew the man wouldn’t drive off with it. It was somewhat dry, except for little splashes and tinkle of drops ricocheting off the pavement or a puddle. The air was warm. The water frigid.
I watched as the man opened the side garage door and exit. His flashlight highlighted his hands locking the door behind him. Just as he stepped off the concrete platform, the garage building, as if sucked down by a tremendous gravity, creaked, roared, and loudly tumbled down into the rushing ravine below the building in a sweeping gesture of destruction. Bricks fell in a cascade, a waterfall of stone pixels into the rushing waters below.
The man slowly turned around in the rain. He shone his flashlight on the destruction before him. His mouth agape. He was still on the phone.
“I’ll tell you what it was. The whole garage and part of the building just fell into the brook… Yes. The building… Into the Monoosnoc, can’t you hear what I am saying? There’s a bunch of crap just floating away. Can you hear me? Yes!…. Okay, I’ll call 911.”
I couldn’t take my eyes off of the destruction. My home. My kids’ home. Gone. We lived there safely. I counted my kids. Five. It wasn’t time to mourn or search, it was time to go. Fast.
The man walked toward us, confused.
I had to run.
I ran with the kids away from the waters, hopefully still behind the truck in his field of vision. I couldn’t see him, so he couldn’t see me. Nature’s only guarantee.
But the escape route was blocked, the waters rushing over the pavements. To our right, a building with no entrances, cracks, or broken windows. Completely solid. To our left, the destroyed building and water just rushing, rushing, rushing by. We stood on the only triangle of pavement not washed away or too deep to traverse.
I turned, and there he was. His flashlight on me. The rain drops beat down, sparkling through the light thrown in my direction. I couldn’t see at all. I was frozen in the most terrifying moment. Blinded. Deafened in the loud shush of the rain. I lay down, petrified. Dead. Frozen.
“Tammy? Hey. I’m still here at the flea market. Part of the building just fell off. I gotta take care of this, but there is a possum here that’s stuck… Yeah, this little guy and its babies won’t make it out, I think the water is gonna keep rising and it looks like it came from inside… Mmmm. Okay. Thanks.”
He made another call. I couldn’t move. I prayed he didn’t see me.
Moments later, utter confusion. Lights, sirens, men running around, more parts of the building crumbling into the rushing river. Then, blackness over my eyes. I felt picked up with my babies and laid down in blankets. I shivered. My babies shivered. It was cold and wet. A slam. An engine noise like a car, muffled.
I wanted to hiss and struggle so much. I had the itch to lash out and run, but I didn’t even know where we were. Staying dead was the best option for us. Quiet. In the dark. At the mercy of whatever this was.
Perhaps it was the end of everything. What could I do about it?
The engine stopped. The rumbling. More rain sounds, a couple bangs, and we were moving again.
So much to be unsure about. I looked to the book, inside in the dark of my mind throughout all of this, and there was nothing about what we experienced.
More hush of water. A squeak.
We were handled in our blankets again, and when the veil of our terrycloth protection was lifted, I prepared to hiss and protect my babies with what little of my life was left.
But there was a little girl looking in. Blonde, curly hair, and a smile dotted with missing teeth. Way fewer teeth than other humans, and I could tell significantly fewer than we had. She was young. She smiled and covered her mouth with a giggle, and it was then that I knew they weren’t dangerous teeth.
The room was bright. It was hard to see. Hard to adjust.
I felt lowered into more water. Warm. Wet heat feeling of when one of the babies pees in the nest and there is no choice but to sleep and left to dry in the morning. Warm wet, everywhere. I crawled to the lip of the basin and watched as a larger woman with the same hair put two, then the remaining three of my babies into the basin with me. The squeak again. The water coming from the shiny tube stopped running.
I could see a wall of water, reflecting the rest of the room above the basin. My front paws held on to the rim, just in case. I looked at my reflection.
I saw my face in the wall waters. I remembered this, still being here, and recorded it in our book. My cuspids. My black eyes and grey and white fur matted with water once chilled to the bone, but now warm. My pink nose. My babies were safe on my back, floating. Hundreds of whiskers, my family. They trusted we would find a place to rehome ourselves under a safer, drier building. No longer a crawlspace for us, but always warm and safe from the cars. Safe from the fox, and the owl, and bobcat like near the lake with the spray and the sand and the house and the woods some others of us live. And now safe from the floods. We wouldn’t have to search for some likeness of something familiar, because we were here. No longer the rush of the icy floods, but the tinkle and drip of a warm bath. The mother’s-tongue lick of a face cloth the woman wiped over me, softly, kindly.
The little girl had a little black box in front of her. She turned it around, and on it I saw the rains outside the big building replayed. I saw me and my babies, hunched over and dead on the pavement in the rain. I saw the woman put a blanket over us, put us in a box with a handle, and put us in a small car. They talked back and forth, and I could see wipers clearing rain from glass. It cut to the box carried in to another building, into this very room we were in, and opened. I saw us emerge from blankets, and saw the little girl doing again what had already happened moments before.
It was all like a memory, but we watched it. It immediately started over again. “No one is going to believe this, isn’t she cute?” the older woman said. “She is the cutest. I want to keep her forever. And the babies.”
“We’ll have to see, Mags, this is a wild animal. She’s had a scary night. For now, we will warm her and her babies up and call in the morning.”
“She’s safe now, though, Momma.”
“That’s right, Mags. This video is great. I’m gonna post it. Wow. I can’t believe all of this.”
She put the little black box down to close her book. I did too. No one has ever heard of our book. It is stored in our collective genetic memory, nocturnal, ever aware of what to do if the flood returns.
2024
Gustav Mützel, 1927
Garrett Zecker 