The Last Woman

Beth tried to soothe his fever. She pressed a fragment of cloth, that she had torn from her dress and soaked in water, against his brow. He was so hot, that it made her shutter.
He looked up at her with glazed eyes. He was entering a state of the deepest delirium. He had been incoherent for hours. She realized that his fever needed to be brought down. But, she didn’t know how to do it.
She began to panic. She looked over into the kitchen. The refrigerator stood in the corner. It had been dormant for years. They had had no working refrigerator for so long that she could barely recall what it was like when they had electricity.
“Medicine, what about medicine?” she said to herself. “Wasn’t there aspirin around. Didn’t we used to have aspirin?” She ran into the bathroom and frantically pulled all the bottles of medicine out of the medicine chest. There were bottles of aspirin, cough medicine and even penicillin, but they were all empty. They had been empty for years. She was so desperately afraid. “This damn world,” she screamed, “this damn world.”
She hurried back to his bed. She touched his hand. He was terribly pale; his breathing was becoming labored.
“Beth,” he said. His voice was very weak.
“Edward,” she responded, hopefully. She bent down over him and placed her ear very close to his trembling lips.
“Beth, Beth, where are you. The river is killing us! Beth, don’t take the water away. Don’t take the water away.”
She was about to console him, but he quickly grew quiet. He was using whatever remaining energy resources he had available to him for breathing.
“He’s ranting, God damn it he’s ranting.” She was so consumed by raw emotion that she began beating on his chest, yelling, “Edward get up, get up. Stop fooling around. This is not funny.” After this outburst, she was overtaken by a contrary feeling. She sat back up and stiffened. She could feel her heart beginning to grow tired and numb. She could sense that her capacity for feeling was being diminished.
She was all too familiar with the progress of this disease. She saw it kill all the people that she knew. They were all gone. Killed by an invisible enemy. She remembered when it first began; when the first reports of the disease began to appear. It was caused by a virus that attacked the medulla of the brain. The onslaught of this disease was terrible to behold. It started innocently enough with fatigue and fever. But, the fever would get progressively worse until breathing became affected. The final stage was the complete cessation of breathing. Unlike the last great epidemic of AIDS that struck humanity in the 1980’s, this time there was no scientific studies regarding its means of infection and cure. As a matter of fact, there were barely any scientists left capable of doing that kind of work.
The virus was indiscriminate in regard to its victims. It had been raging through human populations now for forty years. The plague began when humans all over the world were devastated by the economy of scarcity that was an inevitable result of over-population and the inexorable depletion of the earth’s natural resources.
Beth looked down at her man. “Edward, Edward,” she repeated. She remembered the optimism they once shared when they first began their relationship. “We had hopes, we had plans.” The more she recalled those feelings, the more enraged she became.
“We could have had it all. We could have had it all. We could have been happy.”
She dropped down on her knees besides the bed, and placed her head on Edward’s chest and looked steadily at his pale face. “You can’t die. I’ll be all alone. After you, there is no one else, no one.”
She looked for some expression in his face, some evidence that he had understood. She saw nothing. She wept so completely, that it calmed her emotions. She soon felt fast asleep in that position. She slept so completely that she did not hear Edward’s dying gasps.
The dawn approached and the morning light flooded in through the large broken window. Her eyes opened. It was a while before she could focus. She then saw the unmistakable mask of death. Her screams were so piercing that the entire house seemed to shutter.

Beth found a spot nearby that seemed appropriate for burial. She dug from dawn until late into the night. All the while, tears were streaming down her face.
After the sight was prepared, she returned to the house. She washed Edward's body with great delicacy and extreme attention to detail. She found a large piece of canvas and stretched it between two poles. She then laid the body on the canvas and dragged it to the burial site..
With every mound of dirt, she felt it fall upon her. When she was done, she felt that she too was left in total darkness.
Beth’s impulse during the weeks and months that followed was to end her own life. However, she had a tenacious will to survive, and there was something spectacularly beautiful and serene in a world without the frenetic and often destructive activity of humans.
She worked diligently on shaping her environment to meet her needs. She surrounded herself with plants and decorated the home with various bits of nature. She explored various ways of shaping utensils and objects of a purely esthetic nature from bark and wood and rock and bone. She realized that she had somehow become exceedingly happy and at peace with herself. Part of this, she realized, was due to the fact that she had entirely surrendered to her fate.
One morning after she had arisen from bed, she was feeling particularly nauseous. As she sat in the light of the morning sun, she felt her belly and suddenly realized that she was pregnant. Her being was flooded with emotions. She was ecstatic knowing that she carried part of Edward’s sweet being with her. On the other hand, she was overwhelmed by the responsibility of possibly being the mother of a whole new race of humans. In the shadow of these feelings, she went about the business of survival.

The End