The Last Woman on Earth

This story was inspired by an online game of Scrabble with a good friend of mine during the Great Pandemic of 2020. The words we played are capitalized.

The television was on. He stumbled into the living room, bleery-eyed. 

“Someday,” the news anchor said, “Someday we’ll do all the things we did before.”  

He crouched down inches away from the TV and stared at the date on the crawler. How the fuck had this happened? They’d done it and he'd missed it. He was in lockdown and there was no going home.

Okay, don't worry, RAJ thought, someday soon he’d go back to his apartment, his job, his life. Someday he’d OWN the streets again and go back to all his haunts. He’d RE-ENTER BARS as the king, the man who survived this HEX. Until then, he had to DOZE in this PIG’s DIGS.

“It’s cold in here,” he said.

“Just wait. The furnace will kick on soon. It HEATS up fast.”

He hadn’t been looking at her apartment when they’d first arrived. Now he took a good look around. VASES galore, filled with fake flowers; flowered curtains, a flowered sofa, and a flowered pattern on the area rug. He could almost smell the rotting roses and it was making his stomach LURCH.

In sharp contrast to the floral theme, her walls were grey, like a MINED pit. A visual antacid. All this place needed, he thought, were bars on the window and this’d be a straight up QUOD. She caught him staring.

“It’s called SHALY,” she said, gesturing at the wall. “Like, something shaly.”

That explained everything.

“You wanna watch a movie? Take your pick. I’m going to make cocoa.” She ballooned off to what was presumably the kitchen.

He looked through her predictably RomCom-heavy collection, and picked out an Adam Sandler movie. He waited for her machine to read the DISK.

She came back in with a tray and set it down on the coffee table. She handed him a mug then asked if he liked OAT TRIPE* and he sprayed whipped cream everywhere. She laughed.

“It’s chocolate and Oreo cookie mousse but it’s got oats in it so it’s healthy. I eat it for breakfast sometimes.”

“What’s tripe got to do with it? That’s a cow’s fucking brains.”

“No it isn’t. It’s the first or second stomach of a cow. Any ruminant really.”

“Really?”

“Uh huh.” She didn’t pick up on sarcasm. “I saw it on Jeopardy.”

She dabbed some whipped cream off the table with her fingers then picked up the movie case.

“’Happy Gilmore’?” she said reproachfully, sucking a fingertip. “Isn’t that a GOLFS movie?”

Golfs, for fuck’s sake. It’s your movie, it was on your shelf he wanted to scream at her. He muttered “Don’t gimme any of your BITCH LIP fatso” a little too loudly.

“It’s GOOD FLAB,” she said. “You liked it last night.”

Ah. Last night. He’d been full of VIM then, as his grandfather, that old pussy magnet, would have said with a wink. That enormous ass of hers had been a challenge, like humping a YAK.

Last night was supposed to end with him not falling asleep. Last night was supposed to be about waiting for her to pass out from all the wine and with him tip-toeing out of her room and out of her life. Last night was supposed to be about the UNACTED, the things he hadn’t done YET.

He thought he had till Sunday but as he’d learned on the news, the government had shuttered everything and everyone as of 1 a.m. Saturday morning and, at that particular moment, he’d been balling her. And now he was stuck with her. For the foreseeable future, she was the last woman on EARTH. He drank the cocoa.

She watched the emotions play across his face and when he sipped his drink she went back to the kitchen for the mousse, her hand gripped around the pill bottle in her house coat pocket.



*Seriously, this is a thing, but to paraphrase Tina Turner, "What's tripe got to do, got to do with it?"  https://cookpad.com/us/recipes/4901241-oats-tripe-chocolate-mousse