New Microfiction: The Last Man on Earth

Bitter-sweet is an over-used phrase but it does sum-up our latest story. Technically it is microfiction although it has a poetic quality that allows you to read it as prose poetry as well. Our writer is Holly Walrath, who attended the University of Texas at Austin for her BA in English and the University of Denver for her MLA in Creative Writing. She is a freelance editor and the Associate Director of Writespace, a nonprofit literary center in Houston, Texas. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Pulp Literature, The Vestal Review, and 365 Tomorrows, among others. You can find her on Twitter at @hollylynwalrath and on the web at www.hlwalrath.com


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The Last Man on Earth
by Holly Walrath

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This is me – as I stand on the last bridge, watching the Earth burn. The tides overtake, crumbling cliff and mountain into the Atlantic.

I think about that Whitman poem, the one about the spider ever casting forth filaments to catch on some promontory. It’s supposed to be a metaphor for life, for the way our bodies always return to the sea.

Did I know when I left my wife, safe in the basement, that I would never see her again? She placed her two fingers on the slight crack in the door, our secret cypher, her blue eye peeking out above, and since that day I have often placed my own two fingers on my lips, imagining that they still hold a trace of her kiss.

I feel an absurd kind of déjà vu – I remember a day spent on the beach, sand in my toes, and feeding the seagulls. I remember the sunburn I got that day, it was a hot ache in my very brain, my mind roasted clean of any thoughts. I remember we walked by the water, and the seaweed was black and thick on the sand. I remember the brashness of the waves. I remember the way her hand linked in mine, an anchor chain. As if it knew this day was coming. If it knew, why did it not tell me that one day I would be the last man on earth?

The sun is muddy red and flares. Like memory, the skyscrapers devour themselves. They eclipse. They cuckold the sky.