The Last Prison

I was craning my neck in the bathroom mirror, trying to get a look at the back of my neck. Bright red. Tight and itchy from a day at the beach earlier in the week where I’d skipped the sunscreen and paid for it. Footsteps passed in the hallway outside.

“What time are we leaving for the zoo?” I called out to my sister, Mika.

“Eleven. Reservation’s at eleven thirty.”

The Bay Area was overcast that morning, which was good news for my neck. I was visiting my aunts and uncles with my sister and brother-in-law, our annual trip. I stepped out of the bathroom and called down the hall.

“Aunt Kelley, do you have an umbrella I can use today?”

She emerged from her bedroom. “What kind?”

“A large kind.”

She counted on her hand. “I have a rainbow pride one. And a red, white and blue one.”

My aunt Kelley’s daughter is a lesbian who’s been out for twenty years, married to her wife now. Kelley and her husband have been allies that whole time, the kind who don’t make a production of it because it’s just who they are.

I wish it had been a no-brainer. God knows I’m not ashamed of being gay. But the idea of walking through a public space with something as loud as a pride umbrella isn’t just a statement. It’s also an invitation and not always the good kind.

I thought about my niece and nephew, seven and four. They’d be with us. A few years ago I received death threats on social media that mentioned them and something in me recalibrated after that. I became more careful about what I walked them into. I thought about the setting too. Mostly families at a zoo. We were in California, near San Francisco. The odds of something going sideways were lower here than most places.

“Show me the rainbow one.” I said.

She led me to the garage. The umbrella stood upright in its box like a gay Excalibur. It was bigger and more vivid than I’d expected. I pulled it free.

I was taking the rainbow umbrella.