The Last Gay in the World

The last gay in the world lives in a glass cage at the Global Catastrophes Museum. I visit every day; I have a season pass. Her cage is on the second floor, in the back, past the gift shop where my mom bought a life-size poster of the Father General last time she visited.

The woman paces. Sometimes she writes with a sleek fountain pen, scratching carefully on a giant pad, sprawled on her chair in the center of the room. Her grip is steady and firm. The ink on the paper looks thick and dark, though I can't read the words from here. The sign on her window says the enclosure is temperature controlled. A sunlamp comes on in the morning and dims in the evening.

A group streams past without pausing. She's not interesting anymore, not to them. The last gay, who cares? The Pure Birth League insists a gay hasn't been born in America in over sixty years and once the camps were closed, well, no one knows. I don't know why this one was kept alive. A warning?

Her stained fingers, long and powerful, wrap around the pen. Grey hair hangs down her back in one long braid--she looks like Lara might have as an old woman. Lara, who kissed me one day, and was gone the next, taken to the center while my mother convinced the Human Morality Squad that I was a victim, not an instigator.

The pens stills and she reaches for the pad, glancing toward my shadowy corner. I know she doesn't see me; she can't. But her gaze doesn't waiver and my knees go weak. She flips the pad and holds it up. You're not the only one, it says. You're not alone.