Day 1

My name is Bryony. Just Bryony. Family names don’t mean anything when you are the last human alive.

And I am. The last human.

Todrick died in the night. It was expected. He was old. I’m old.

I don’t know why I’m writing. No one is going to read this.

Perhaps to make it real.

Speech dies in the air when there is no one to hear. No one to understand. No one to catch it and throw it back to you.

It’s lonely.

Lonelier than I knew it could be, and I’ve spent a lifetime braced for it.

We always knew we’d be the last.

It started with our great-great-grandparents; our air, land and waters so polluted our bodies rejected embryos, and those that survived were often too weak to live. So many dead children. Maybe if the food was clean, they would have made it. Maybe if they had breathed the air I now breathe, they would have had a chance. Maybe if the waters had run pure, they could have drunk it down and strengthened their bodies.

But they couldn’t. Nothing was clean.

My mother thought the infertility started much earlier, warning bells ringing across the earth.

No one listened.

In my grandmother’s generation, only 25% of known pregnancies survived to term. Only 25% of those survived infancy. 6 or 7 children for every 100 pregnancies.

You’d think humanity would realise we must work together to survive.

We did not.

It was the rich who survived. Those who had hoarded wealth.

They didn’t know how to share, only how to steal and plunder. “Our children must survive,” they declared. “The future of humanity rests with the smart, the educated.” They went to war over resources, depleting already depleted lands. And killing.

So much killing.

Of the six children, only 1 survived to adulthood.

20,000 adults on a planet that had once held billions.

The statistics repeated themselves when my mother was born, only with less fighting. My grandparents had learned the lessons of their parents.

It was too late.

The fighting had destroyed so much. Mothers and babies died in childbirth. Some never menstruated at all; their bodies exhausted with the chaos in the world.

My mother was one of about 1000 children who survived infancy, safely cosseted in her ancestral mansion. 400 of them reached adulthood, 210 of them women.

They centralised then, the wealthy survivors of past generations. “We must unite,” they said. “Become as Adam and Eve. Repopulate the earth.”

It was far, far too late for that.

I was one of 30 children who survived infancy. Most of us made it to adulthood.

Our parents were excited. Maybe it would work. Maybe we could recover, save humanity.

I was one of 3 who gave birth to a living child. My daughter rests beneath the oak trees invading my ancestor’s lands.

Eventually, we stopped trying.

The pain was too much.

I was born into death. I was born into grief. I was a desperate shout against the encroaching silence.

Now I am the last, and my voice dies the moment it leaves my mouth.