The Last Woman on Earth

Abstract

The Last Woman on Earth Kate Folk (bio) The Last Woman on Earth lives in Los Angeles. She's single and in her thirties, five foot seven, 145 pounds, a Virgo. She is the world's most famous celebrity. Her talk show has the largest viewership of any tv program, with higher ratings than the Super Bowl and reruns of old Miss Universe pageants. The Last Woman on Earth is not particularly talented or charismatic. She blinks a lot and garbles her own script from the tele-prompter. Prior to the annihilation of every other woman on Earth, The Last Woman lived in Ohio and taught preschool. She didn't ask to be the last woman on Earth, but she's doing the best she can. The Last Woman on Earth's talk show is called Afternoon Programming with the Woman. She models the show after Oprah. In the first season, men come on and sit in leather chairs and reminisce about women they used to know. Some men talk about their wives and girlfriends, but most talk about their mothers. It's like therapy, but The Last Woman on Earth isn't a therapist, so she just sits there and nods and utters vague, affirmative phrases like "wow" and "really?" and "that sounds tough." The men always cry. The Last Woman on Earth gets tired of hearing about mothers and in the second season changes the focus of her show to baking. In the second season of her show, The Last Woman on Earth bakes pie after pie in the studio kitchen. She ties her hair in a kerchief and wears a white apron printed with cherries. She invites experts in various fields to come talk to her while she bakes. For forty-five minutes the expert lectures to her sweatered back while she rolls out store-bought dough, mixes fruit with cornstarch, and brushes her lattice crusts with egg wash. A split screen shows a close-up of the pie in progress alongside the face of the expert as he drones on about urban planning or carpentry or neuroscience or poetry. At the end of each episode, The Last Woman on Earth presents the finished pie to the expert. She serves him a piece and waits for him to tell her it's the best pie he's ever had, hands down, bar none, etc. [End Page 93] Thousands of men apply to come on the show. Everyone wants to taste pie made by a woman. When the expert has had his fill of pie The Last Woman thanks him and retires to a dimly lit lounge, where she drinks cocktails with a female friend who is played by a mop. The Last Woman on Earth recounts to her friend all the interesting information she learned from the day's expert. Sometimes a production assistant crawls onto the set and gives the mop handle a shake so it looks like the friend is listening. The episode ends whenever The Last Woman on Earth begins weeping. The Last Woman on Earth appears on the cover of every issue of US Weekly. Countless articles discuss her dating life, speculating on why she won't settle down with one of the hundreds of millions of age-appropriate heterosexual men left in the world. In reality the only men who want to date The Last Woman on Earth are perverts and fame-seekers. It's too much pressure, dating the only woman who exists. Normal men would rather just date each other. In her spare time, The Last Woman on Earth enjoys hiking Runyon Canyon in clumsy male drag and making paintings that depict extinct species: the West African black rhinoceros, the Pyrenean Ibex, the Caribbean Monk Seal. But The Last Woman on Earth has less and less free time as her empire continues to grow. Her schedule is packed with meetings: with her agent, her personal trainer, foreign heads of state, and her ghostwriter, Phillip, who's hard at work on her memoir, tentatively titled The Woman Who Wouldn't Die. The Last Woman's website receives thousands of inquiries a day. Men turn to her whenever they want a female...