The Last Gay in the World
by Finnian Burnett
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?
