Summer 2019 Issue - The Harvard Advocate

On a summertime Tuesday night, the Brooklyn queer bar 3 Dollar Bill readied itself to host an unlikely trinity. I wandered in among the ticketholders who were congregating, apparently undaunted by the impending weekday morning, for a performance of Oscar at the Crown. The website announcing this “immersive nightclub phenomenon” promised a show that would situate in one dystopian future the three pillars of society: sequins, Oscar Wilde, and the housewives of Orange County.

Peter Bradley was one of two children formally adopted by a woman named Edith Ramsay Strange: he survives; the girl is dead. Edith Ramsay Strange took in 62 other foster children but she did not adopt any of them. Edith brought Peter to her home when he was three days old; Peter did not know from where. He did not know why he was adopted and the others were not but he did know that being adopted meant that he could paint. Peter had pocket money, his own room at the top of the house, and tailor-made clothing. None of the other children had these things and Peter could feel that his mother bestowed these privileges on him not because she favored him over the others, but as a shield against the taunts that would surely come from the children who Edith Ramsay Strange had not chosen to adopt.



The house where Edith Ramsay Strange brought up Peter Bradley was in Western Pennsylvania and it had 27 bedrooms. The window in Peter’s bedroom looked onto the Youghiogheny River, a river that George Washington’s horse crossed when George Washington was on his way to set up Pittsburgh.



Peter woke up each morning and spent the day painting. In the evening, his mother came upstairs after a day of work. Edith Ramsay Strange did not do the work expected of a Black woman in Western Pennsylvania in the 1940s, she refused to do that, just as she refused to be listed in the Green Book (you either knew or you didn’t). She did not sweep white floors; instead, Edith Ramsay Strange accepted payments from the state of Pennsylvania for each of the 62 children she fostered, and she held shares in famous jazz clubs in Detroit and Baltimore and Pittsburgh. Every evening, Peter’s mother came upstairs and leaned against the left side of the door to his room and the Youghiogheny River reflected the light of sundown against her reddish hair. She asked how many drawings Peter had made that day and Peter told her how many and she said, “I like this one,” and “I don’t like that one,” and then she asked how much paint Peter needed for the next day and he told her just how much. Then she went to the paint store, which in their town was called Bradley Paints, a coincidence.



In the living room, books on railroad law were stacked on the coffee table and among picture frames, as if the house was a furnished rental owned by a railroad company.



It was, in a way. Peter got the name Bradley from Edith’s second husband, a man named William Bradley. William was a cook for the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad Company, which is one of four railroad properties one can purchase in a game of Monopoly. When a train carrying Mr. Bradley passed by, Edith stood on the back porch and waved but William did not look up from the flank steak before him. How could he have known? Edith’s porch was just far enough from the tracks that her hair did not rustle as the train passed, but the bird feeder a yard closer did give a shudder. His “father’s” work and the law books were Peter’s clues that the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad Company was not a ghost in the house but a landlord.



Edith Ramsay Strange’s lease on the house was a precarious arrangement. Someone at the company had taken a liking to her and decided that she and William Bradley should live there and pay very little money. Because the house was given to her off-the-books, seen as charity, Edith did not enjoy the ease of entitlement that someone who had acquired a house with 27 bedrooms through inheritance, or oil money, might have. She could have lost it at any moment, had the smoky paunch over at Baltimore & Ohio Railroad Company decided that the home would be better suited in the hands of a more lucrative employee. The house belonged to Edith Ramsay Strange but, lest it be revoked, she committed herself to a frantic milking of the space, a total use.



A long time later, in 1976, Peter Bradley found himself in the window seat on a flight home to New York City next to a man who seemed to wish that he, and not Peter Bradley, were sitting in the window seat. When Peter looked down into his pack of peanuts he felt the man lean over him to watch the city grow larger in the window. Soon, the man turned to Peter. “This is a good suit,” he said. Peter wore a silk suit custom-made by Roland Meledandri, of Fifty-Fourth Street between Park and Madison Avenues in Manhattan. Peter Bradley almost always wore custom-made suits, and had since he was a child, so when the people at Perls Gallery, where he worked selling art, tried to get him an account at Bloomingdales, Peter said no, it would be Meledandri or it would be nothing at all. And yet, at Perls, Peter had to eat his lunch upstairs inside the gallery because they did not want him having his lunch with the Sotheby’s Girls across the street.



The man in the aisle seat was named Thomas K. Wong. He was the head of the Chinatown Service Center, which controlled large buildings in downtown Manhattan. Thomas K. Wong asked Peter if he would like to come and check out this firehouse he had Downtown. Peter Bradley’s mother had taught him to like unusual houses, so Peter said yes, he would come and take a look.



Firehouse Engine Company Thirty One on the corner of Lafayette and White Streets in the lower part of Manhattan was built in 1895 to resemble a castle in France. When he saw the firehouse, Peter told Thomas that yes, he would like to live there.



An unlikely sequence of events led Peter Bradley to stand in 1976 on a sidewalk outside an empty firehouse: In 1972, Engine Company Thirty One dissolved. The firehouse passed from the New York City Fire Department to the Chinatown Service Center, which gave Thomas K. Wong control of the deed. The Chinatown Service Center put ping pong tables on the ground floor for community use. They were in search of a tenant for the upper floor when Thomas K. Wong met Peter Bradley on an airplane and heard that he was looking for a new place to live. Peter’s mother had a house with 27 bedrooms because a vacancy had needed filling; both he and Edith were seen by their landlords as temporary, stopgap tenants but they did not see their tenancy that way, for why would a person see themselves as temporary?



Although Peter paid Thomas $450 in rent each month, he moved into the firehouse as if he had purchased it. Peter was not at all cowed by his renter status, nor by the many empty rooms in his new house. The cavernous top of the firehouse was not too large for Peter Bradley, his wife Suzanne McClelland, one Basenji named Rue, and one Rhodesian Ridgeback named Ruffian (all of the animals they ever had would be named with the letter “R”). The family expanded, grew louder, until the house was just the right size for the four of them. One bedroom, three studios, one kitchen, one living room, and two closets. Peter ordered a 30-foot Saguaro cactus from Arizona and planted it in the center of his living room, like a flag on the moon. When it arrived on Lafayette Street, a crane had to tip the cactus from the sidewalk, over the terrace, and into the firehouse through an open window. It seemed to trail red sand the way children’s feet track through the house when they return from the beach.



The firehouse did not have any heat, so Peter and Suzanne burned wood they brought from forests upstate where it was free. At night they also took wooden crates from the Gristedes parking lot which had held tomatoes or bananas in the afternoon and they burned those.



Peter used 7500 Altec Lansing speakers, the best kind, he thought, to keep away the silence. He liked to listen to the same musicians that his mother picked up from the train station and drove to her house, where they could sleep and have breakfast. Music played all the time in the firehouse. This tactic he had also learned from Edith, who played music all the time in the same way that in a quiet forest, you speak too loudly and step heavy on the path, to scare away the snakes. If the music stopped, Peter and Suzanne heard the dim thud of ping pong paddles. Later, they heard a family downstairs listening to the Beatles.



On Friday afternoons, the Boys Choir of Harlem took a yellow bus to the firehouse. They ate popcorn and drank guava juice seated on the edge of low white couches draped with cowskins. They were told to take off their blazers if they really wanted to paint, and then they entered the studio near the kitchen and Peter began their art lesson.



If he had any Black neighbors, Peter Bradley did not know them. In the 1970s and 1980s, the people who owned large lofts in Soho and Tribeca were white. They were not yet hedge-fund people, they were artists, but they were white people. Peter would have liked for the firehouse to be a place where Black artists gathered, but this did not happen naturally because most of the people who drifted in and out of the firehouse lived nearby. Peter had done four shows with André Emmerich, a prestigious gallerist who did not show any other Black artists in that decade or in any decade which had come before. Peter was aware of his place at the mercy of the white curators, dealers, and collectors.



In the spring of 1981, Peter found two white men standing in his firehouse, having a look around, checking out his walls and windows and tiling. (When the Chinatown Service Center had knocked out all of the tiles downstairs and they lay in a quiet heap, Peter carried them upstairs in cooking pots and lined his kitchen and bathroom with rescued porcelain.) Peter saw the way these men were appraising his home and he called into the bedroom, “Suzanne, they’re going to try and take away our firehouse.”



Jon Alpert was a 33-year old white man from Port Chester, New York, who owned a television company and held a black belt in karate. Earlier in 1981, the City of New York had indicted Thomas K. Wong for corruption or embezzlement and control of the firehouse fell to another landlord, a man more interested in profit than Wong. Soon after, Alpert and the Downtown Community Television Center had moved in downstairs, replacing Thomas K. Wong’s community center and its ping pong tables.



Alpert’s ambitions turned out to be larger than one third of a firehouse. Alpert had tried to buy out many of Peter’s neighbors, but when they’d said no, he backed off. With Peter, Alpert was dogged, remaining at his heels, deterred neither by adamance nor by outrage. He did not accept Peter’s no as he had the no’s of the other loft residents and Peter recognized this for what it was.



Peter fought the eviction for five years. If the new landlord won, he would not buy Peter out; he would tell Peter to leave his home and then he would give Peter’s lease to Jon Alpert, who would soon have the money to buy the firehouse. Peter never learned the name of the law firm he was up against and he felt that his own lawyers were unreliable and lethargic. To pay for these lawyers, Peter painted Downtown courthouses for Rambusch Decorating Company. Each day, Peter was required to use two full gallons of paint. He was permitted only to use a brush and not a roller, which made painting walls and ceilings very slow, and by the end, Peter needed a new shoulder.



A doorway, rather than a real door, had always separated Peter’s floor from the floor below. Only the sort of people who Peter wanted to see came up the stairs. But after Alpert’s lease had begun, Peter sometimes came home or out of the bathroom to find an old white man and woman standing like ghosts in his loft. Peter looked at them—they looked back and did not speak. Taking their time, they nodded formally before returning downstairs. Peter learned that these were the parents of Jon Alpert. He installed a door with a lock at the top of the stairwell.



One day Peter returned from the courthouse to find that another Rambusch Decorator had left a 12 gauge sawed-off shotgun leaning against his door. People who spent lots of time in the firehouse hoped Peter would kill Jon Alpert. Many felt as if the firehouse was being taken from them, too. Suzanne became pregnant that year, and Peter said, it would now be a crime to take the firehouse away. The child was born. Jon Alpert was lucky Peter was an artist, Peter thought with relief, or Peter might have killed him.



Jon Alpert might have thought about things like this: here is a large place that I want and here is Peter Bradley, who is, one might say, already something of a misfit in the neighborhood. Jon might have thought: there is a temporariness of Peter Bradley in this neighborhood beyond the temporary quality of his rental of the firehouse, and then Jon might have guessed that things would yield to his gentle prodding more easily if he went after Peter Bradley’s home and not the home of another person in the neighborhood, that Peter’s being Black would make him much easier to dislodge.



 



Peter Bradley never ceased to resist eviction, and yet, in September 1989, Jon Alpert took his firehouse. Peter thought, this is a terrible, terrible interruption. A friend of Peter’s came to help him move and they stood together in the living room, pushing things out of the house. And then Peter’s friend did something strange. Almost everything was gone and they did not want to leave this firehouse and stand on the curb and wonder where to go. A large, heavy chain lay on the floor and the man walked over to it and picked it up, and Peter looked and did not stop him, and in lieu of a final scream, the man threw the chain out the door, where Jon Alpert was standing, watching.



Peter Bradley did not have a home for the three days after his birth, until he was adopted by Edith Ramsay Strange. 52 years later, Peter found himself homeless once more. He did not move to a new house when he left the firehouse; he did not have another house. Peter lived on the streets of Manhattan that fall, and in the winter, too.



Peter lost a lot of things along with his firehouse: a Saguaro cactus, a beautiful French vase, silk suits made by Roland Meledandri, four hundred paintings (his friends’, his wife’s, his own), the skull of an elephant from South Africa who had only died and had not been killed. He lost his friends, because one cannot continue to see the same people if they have no way to come and see you, or if the only place they know to find you is inside of a small crack house on 10th Street and Second Avenue. He also lost his daughter, who moved with Suzanne into an apartment her parents bought for her in Battery Park City. Peter was not allowed to move with them; he was, as Suzanne’s father put it, out of control.  



In 1990, Peter Bradley stopped living on the street and began to live on the road. He drove towards Canada with a man named Art Blakey, a famous jazz drummer from Pittsburgh, which is near the Youghiogheny River. Peter and Art were in Saugerties, New York, and it was snowing, when they drove past a stone house that was very large, and where not a single person had lived for sixty years. Peter lives there now, with a woman named Debra and a dog named Ruffian that is not a Rhodesian Ridgeback but a different type of dog altogether.

For Charlottesville

My city, hardly a city, still
swimming like a newborn—
two winters into this dream
the streets feel pale and distant.
I made my room so clean last night
I thought I might disappear, folding
laundry until the space looked smaller
like something out of a children’s book.
Or like Meg’s window in the corner of the television.
Or like an engine in reverse but heard
through playback. Last night in the dark
something seemed to give, so I scraped the salt-licked brick
for the heat beneath. In the newer version of this dream
everything is still red and distant
and August finds bodies pressed to the street
like too many petals collapsing. Each husk unearthed, unfolded
in my two steady hands. My city, I am trying to write my way
back to you, but out here I remember
only echo or ghost. Or these hands
shaking, all through the night.
Even in the body each story ends
outside of the body, and here in snowy Boston
something is left buried. Easily, like broken glass. Like light
bouncing off the sidewalk.

What I need is a simple algorithm
for hearing myself.

I must learn to talk
as the birds talk amongst themselves.

I sit beside you facing the sea.
Hold the shell. Press it to your ear.

Land lies, not for use of self. Very slowly do

things vary. In some sense, rock breaks from
rock to become other. In another sense, black

knowns are always moving to the unknown.
Or skin. There are some places in this world

that are loved. And still other loves that are
placed. There is this place and there is this love.

Here. Under the olive branch. Except for now,
you have not yet pulled roadside in our descent.
I passed the silence by eating dates, sucking slow

pits to spit each seed out lowered window and
last pressing lone walnuts into defaced soft.
This is not you pausing to pull self from

self to relieve. This is me in the car seeing
you pool off and down. Dare me to speak
of what lies, below. Of Mary coming

to the well, only to see her guards, as well
as her angel. Each night, I remember every
part of my body has been touched except

the inside. And I am inside. I am letting myself
happen. As crows above turn quickening

berserk, taking flight over sky rising poppy
petal. Now. You were there. Above. You

were there. Nazareth is waiting. Nazareth waits
for no-one. I am still miles behind us, full

of wonder, at what palm each pit might become.

I met Qiuhai on a fall day in a harbor city—a manner fitting for her name, although I wouldn’t have said this out loud. Names were flexible and wishful like that. You could create a beautiful memory out of any name. For Qiuhai, I chose to preserve where we met and the conditions of it: how our small classroom was framed by a specific time in the year and, further away where we couldn’t notice it, the sea.

I see her looking up from her textbook first, cropped gray hair pushed away from the face. Then Zhengjie sits in the desk at her right side, smiling easily and arched toward the book where the answers are, his smile moving back and forth between the other two of us in the room. I knew them together only—one unit.  

“Teacher, we are very happy to meet you at this time,” Qiuhai said in a low voice after I introduced myself in misshapen, childlike Mandarin Chinese and closed the classroom door on the first day. Her husband glanced at the window beside it to make sure no one else walked down the hall. “We’ve already been called for the test.” Her mouth was a short frown, and she pushed both sides of her hair away, two hands in the same quick gesture.

“The test?”

“Cit-zenship interview,” she sounded out in English.

Zhengjie wheeled his desk closer to mine. “Our friends”—he gestured with both hands toward the hallway—“told us it would take seven or eight months for the officials to send out the appointment notice. For those months we planned on coming here to prepare. But two months after we turned in the N-400, we already got the government notice. Her test,” he said, and at this point he whispered, palms upward on the table, “is at the end of October.” He glanced in her direction. “Then I’ll go two weeks after.”

“Teacher, you will help us, correct? We only have five weeks together.” Qiuhai’s hands were pressed together earnestly, one tangled in the other’s fingers.

I was a freshman in college teaching at a local community center in Chinatown for the first time. Immigrants, mostly elderly, came to learn English and prepare and practice for their naturalization exams. I wasn’t the only college student helping out: small groups of undergrads came from different schools around the area. We volunteered under an organization staffed by people who’d grown up in Chinatown, but most of us didn’t have connections to the neighborhood ourselves. Our parents were from the generations that had immigrated on student visas in the 80s and 90s, recently enough to be disconnected from the misfortunes of history.

Qiuhai was still watching, both hands clasped in her lap. I said that of course I’d help her, and I made the promise to myself too—if there was one thing I could do to remediate for any of my past lives, I would start here with this woman who was older than my own grandmother but scared and, for all I knew, kinder. “We’ll do the best we can.”

She smiled, and even her smile had the slightest shape of a frown. Then we ran through the citizenship exam for the first time. She struggled with English and made no effort to hide it, apologizing and pushing her hair out of her face. If she couldn’t understand the question I asked, she repeated it to herself under her breath with her mouth twisted slightly down, sounding out the same words, narrowing in on a segment or phrase, while staring a bit past my eyes. Sometimes the answer came out like that. Other times, she couldn’t hear the question I asked, and recited the answer to the one she thought she’d heard.

Zhengjie listened to the questions alongside her. When Qiuhai repeated questions to herself, I sometimes glanced his way—he looked up toward the ceiling to remember an answer and then checked the textbook with a smile. When he was confused, he put his hand against his head to think, flattening a patch of white hair.

Years from now, she will remember the ash that followed her. The cities charred and smoldered behind her, plumes of smoke like storm clouds in the rearview. The air was dense and syrupy with car exhaust and ash, vermillion sunsets like something out of science fiction, electric and strange. Wildfire tinged each grapevine in the Sonoma vineyards, boiling the grape juice on site and disrupting the ferment. In every cabernet bottled that year, the faint edge of smoke cut through like rot.

Reports of the wildfires occupied news headlines for weeks after. Atlas, Cascade, Sulphur. They named the fires like animals, a new one to report each morning. *Investigations ongoing*, the news anchor said gravely, the satellite images in stop-motion swirls, gray pixels dancing behind him in delayed flurries. *Strong winds. Human carelessness*.

Carelessness, she thought. That’s all it was. Accident. But some fires started on purpose. Forests knew self-cleansing better than anyone. It was programmed into their DNA—like the way a mother knew the sound of her infant’s cry with her body. The way children thrilled to water like a second home.

The day she left, highways clogged with minivans and Explorers, traffic bottlenecked and stood still for miles of the Interstate. She took local roads, navigating unpaved gravel streets that rattled the Datsun. All those empty houses of evacuated towns, like the set of a film. The kitchens in Sonoma and the living rooms in Mendocino reduced to rubble. All those places left behind.

The Datsun stalled around Fairfield. Miles and miles of cars, helmed by drivers with white surgical masks, breathing their own wet breath. Stopped behind a Chevrolet, she thought of a Ford she passed back near Petaluma, a boy in the passenger seat. He stared at her not unkindly, and she was startled by the wide spotlight of his gaze. As if he’d been watching her long before she noticed. As if he’d always seen her, and everything else, all of it, from the beginning to the end.

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 teleprompter. 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.

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 perspective. Typically they are struggling to interpret the actions of a woman from their past. They turn to the Last Woman on Earth for closure. A team of interns handles this correspondence, typically by sending a form response that emphasizes staying in the present moment by practicing mindfulness.

But as years pass, men are less and less interested in what the Last Woman on Earth thinks. Thought pieces are published on Slate and Medium with titles like, “The Increasing Irrelevance of the Woman.” The Last Woman On Earth reads comments on these articles, and on YouTube clips of her show, and on gossip blogs that dissect her nonexistent love life. Many men wish the last woman on Earth was better. She’s so average, they say. Why couldn’t we be left with Rihanna or Megan Fox? Or, if not a physical beauty, we could at least get a Last Woman who’s a genius, or who knows lots of jokes. Men comment that her pies probably aren’t that good. She uses recipes from the old Martha Stewart website, and doesn’t even make her own dough. One commenter points out that there are thousands of talented male bakers in the world, but none of them gets his own show. Everything the Last Woman does would be done better by one of the Earth’s numerous men. The Last Woman on Earth agrees with this assessment. She is often sad.

In the third season of her talk show, The Last Woman on Earth goes back to the Oprah format. This time, she invites negative commenters onto the show and allows them to insult her to her face. Most of them are ashamed and say they’re sorry, which irritates her because it does not make for good TV. Once in awhile she’ll get a real fighter who tells her exactly what he thinks of her. The Last Woman feels truly alive in these moments. She instructs her cameramen to zoom in on her as the man spews his vitriol, capturing the subtle pain that flickers across her stoic face. But the audience hates these episodes. We only have one Woman, her supporters point out. We need to treat her right. All the men who criticize the Last Woman on camera are murdered sooner or later. On her show, The Last Woman on Earth goes back to baking pies.

When The Last Woman On Earth dies, days shy of her fortieth birthday, the 405 is shut down for a ten-mile funeral procession that is simulcast worldwide. No one goes to work that day. Everyone watches the funeral of The Last Woman On Earth on TV, in bars and recreation centers and women’s restrooms that have been repurposed as shrines commemorating the former existence of women. The men of Earth try to outdo each other in performing their grief. They dress up as the Last Woman on Earth, wearing wigs and lipstick and aprons over vintage circle skirts. Privately, they are relieved that the Last Woman on Earth is gone. They can finally do and say whatever they want. The English language is restored to its former simplicity. Everyone speaks freely about the fate of mankind.

It is a golden era for men, these fifty-six years it takes for the human species to die out. The Last Man on Earth is ninety-four years old when he moves to Los Angeles. He broadcasts subversive, thought-provoking and hilarious skits from the studio where the Last Woman on Earth had once taped her show. He wishes there was someone left to see his show, which is much better than hers was. He should have had his own talk show sixty years ago. Instead, the Last Woman on Earth had been handed a talk show, not because she deserved it, but simply because she was a woman. The Last Man on Earth dies with resentment in his heart.



*“The Last Woman on Earth” was originally published in Prairie Schooner.