I was born in north Texas, where the Trinity River starts before it flows all the way to Houston, so Mama called me Trinity. My older sister is named after the Texas Bluebell, only spelled pretty. Belle can remember our daddy who died in a military training accident, leaving Mama with two little girls. They didn’t ever marry, so his death benefits went to his parents, who wanted nothing to do with us.

The school bus picked us up outside our apartment complex, along with lots of other kids, but dropped us at our grandparents’ after school every day so Mama could work, first as a waitress, then as a hostess at a steak house.

Then Mama started being late coming to get us. Granny’d have to put us to bed at their house and didn’t like to wake us to go home. There came a time when our mama didn’t come for us ‘til morning. Granddad was real angry and there was yelling and something breaking in the kitchen and I think Granny crying.

And we didn’t see our mama ever again. I’ve tried to find out what became of her, but I never could. She simply vanished from this earth. Me and Belle told each other she married and we just don’t know her name, but she never once sent a postcard or anything.

So that’s how we came to live with Granddad and Granny. Belle was Little Miss Perfect, kept her dress clean, sang hymns to her stuffed animals, finished her homework, and helped Granny in the kitchen, while I ran inside the house, teased the dog, and sassed Granny. Typical tomboy doings.

Granddad had both a short temper—I imagine being saddled with two children late in life had something to do with it—and a shaving strap, the thick leather kind his own granddad probably used to hone his straight razor. Granddad shaved with an electric, but he kept that strap handy.

Seems like two-three times a month, he’d whip my bare butt out back in his workshop until I was howling. For days I’d be sore—but not sorry. More often I’d be mad, because I wasn’t trying to tear my dress, break that plate, or knock over some house plant. It just happened.

“Why can’t you be good?” Belle would ask.

“Why can’t you mind your own fucking business?” I’d learned that word by listening to Granddad, but he’d whip me good if he heard me using it.

Granny was a no-nonsense woman who didn’t like or understand girls like me, but I suspect she loved me just the same. For being her daughter’s daughter, I reckon. Maybe that was all it took. Sometimes she took me away from Granddad as he hauled me by one arm toward the workshop and my fate.

“Trinity don’t mean to be bad,” she said. “She’s just out of sorts, and if you paid the attention I do, you’d know why. Reckon I know just what she needs, and it ain’t a taste of your shaving strap.”

Granny’d take me into the bathroom—their house only had the one—for an enema. When I was little, she’d start the water in the sink, then get out a big jar of Vaseline and this red bulb from under the sink. Next she’d close the lid on the toilet, sit down, and rearrange her dress, baring the tops of her stockings. Last she’d pull my pants down—I resisted wearing a dress whenever I could—and lift me right up to set me across her lap without wrinkling her dress. I had to be pretty young.

By then the water’d be billowing hot, and she’d adjust the temperature and let the sink fill up, with this white bar of soap floating in it. Granny popped the metal cap off the Vaseline and stirred it with her pointer finger, then spread my cheeks open and rubbed it all around my butthole before she poked it inside me, which hurt, and stirred my innards as deep as her finger would go.

She’d turn off the water and fill that red bulb all the way, making sure there wasn’t any air in there, then stick it into my greased butt and squeeze until it was all inside of me. Three for four times, I think, maybe five. It felt strange and awful. Then she’d put her finger back inside me, to help me hold it. “Five minutes,” she said. “I want you to try harder to be a good girl, you hear? Because even if you’re actin’ up today on account of your bowels, you and I both know there’s plenty of times that ain’t it. Tell me you’ll try, Trinity.”

“Yes’m, I will.”

“You’d better, young lady, because your granddad and me don’t intend to make the same mistakes with you as we did with your mama. We let her get away with all kinds of things when she should have been punished, and look where it got her. A baby, with no husband in sight, not once but twice. If she’d got her butt blistered, she’d have thought twice. You’re surely going to.”

It was a real long five minutes. It was also a thousand times better than Granddad’s strap.

I was probably eight when I graduated to a real enema bag, that same ugly red as the bulb. I was getting too big to go over Granny’s lap by then, so I’d bend over the side of the tub—their house was old and had one of those tubs on claw feet—and get that Vaseline finger same as always, sometimes twice, then the enema nozzle. Only I think it was the douche nozzle, a little bigger at the end that goes in, with holes on the sides? I swear I could feel that hot soapy water spraying inside me, and I’d get so full I thought I’d explode. “Stop it, Granny, please stop. It hurts! Real bad. Please, you have to stop it, have to! Please!”

She would, but only for a minute or two. I was getting every drop, no matter how much I complained or how bad it hurt. There were times it was hard not to cry, but I was a big girl and only dopey girls cried.

I had to hold it myself while she watched me squirming and shaking, until the five minutes was up. She’d leave then, so I could empty in privacy. It was my job to clean up the bag and such, and when I came out, I had to thank her.

At the time, I resented that especially much, but two things happened. One, I realized she gave me that enema to save me from a strapping, which was because she loved me no matter what I did, and that was something worth thanking. Two, even though I didn’t like them one bit, I started getting these strange excited feelings during every enema. I didn’t rightly know how to manage them excepting by running outside and climbing one of the two trees in the yard, sitting with that rough thick limb between my legs and pretending I was riding a bucking bronco.

I knew it was silly even then; we weren’t ranchers or rodeo people. But as I rode that imaginary horse, something would happen that eased my excitement. Later, when I was too big to be climbing trees, I searched for something to take its place and begged my grandparents for a bicycle I rode to school and after enemas.

This one time, my granddaddy disagreed that I should get an enema instead of his strap, said I needed my butt blistered, and Granny told him she knew he was just as out of sorts as Trinity, for the same reason, and if he kept up this nonsense, he’d be next. Way he reacted, I believe she had done it before.

So anyway, all my childhood I got my bare butt whipped ‘ceptin’ when an enema might save me. Plenty of other kids at school got the strap, belt, or paddle, although that was more often the boys. If they got enemas, too, they didn’t talk about it, same as me. There were a lot of bikes in the bike rack at school. Were any there for the same reason mine was?

Then my granddad caught me with Marisol Ramos’s mouth on my tittie and one finger up my butt, out back of the workshop, and for the first time I got both the strap and an enema, then thrown out. It was my fourteenth summer. I slept outside, and just before dawn I crept back to fetch things Belle set out for me: a backpack, my jacket, money, food… Her being Miss Perfect had its good side, nobody suspecting she’d do such a thing. I hoped she wouldn’t get in trouble.

Same as Mama, I made sure they’d never find me, hitchhiking over a thousand miles to a city where I’d find work, dress in real nice clothes, and live in a fine apartment like on television, and never again get my ass whipped or an enema.

Didn’t happen, of course. I’ve rented rooms by the week, sometimes a studio apartment month by month, every one with vermin of one kind or another. Mice is good—it means there’s no rats. There’s nothing good about roaches, though.

You live in a dump, you don’t spend much time at home if you can help it. Needing both the cash and the benefit of AC or heat that my place lacked, I worked two under-the-table jobs when I could, starting early in the morning bussing tables at a coffee shop then switching to the fryer at this chicken place where hardly anybody spoke English. I wished I’d learned Spanish when half the kids I knew spoke it at home. I pretended I didn’t understand “bollera” and “hombre trans,” names they called me right where I could hear. I wasn’t a pussy-eating lesbian or a trans man—and so what if I was?

I walked the city a lot, just exploring, ducking into public spaces when I got cold or the rain came down hard. I could afford a cup of coffee to sip for a half hour, or I’d browse pretty much any kind of store that welcomed it. Some store owners were real talkative if they weren’t busy, and I learned a lot about antique books, canes, sex toys, and oriental rugs, even though I never bought anything. For a time I worked for the oriental rug man, even ran the store when Saul was sick in the hospital, but he died and that was that. I can still spot a good rug and tell you why it is.

Sometimes, especially in winter when it felt like I’d never again be all the way warm, I’d miss Texas and Belle and maybe Granny. My sister never replied to the birthday card I sent her that first August, my address enclosed, so I reckon they kept it from her. They made you sign up for a free email account at the computer lab in high school, and I tried a few emails to Belle, knowing she’d only see them at school. I thanked her for her help getting away, told her I was okay and how to reach me, but never got a reply to those, either. I still sent best wishes on her birthday and Christmas for a time, but that petered out, as one-way conversations do.

Years slipped by while I was running myself ragged to keep my head above water. I worked sixty hours or more most weeks and felt entitled to nurse a beer for a long time at a handful of bars near work or home. I was good-looking in a way, not girly-pretty like Belle and them, but more like those capable young women who could rope a calf and carry a bag of feed, strong being an essential part of what looks so fine. Whatever it was, I liked feeling people’s approving eyes on me. Sometimes a man or woman would buy me a drink, come and sit with me, but I never went home with anybody.

Then I got Belle’s email.

She’d sent it to everybody in her address book, including me, the first I’d heard from her since I left. It gave the date, time, and directions for Granddad’s memorial service. I hoped they were burying his damned strap with him.

Late that afternoon, I accepted a fresh beer from a nice-looking older woman who came to chat a time, then suggested dinner. “My treat, dear. I’m further along in my career, and it’s a pleasure to have a nice young woman join me.”

The restaurant had white tablecloths and crystal glasses, and I felt out of place immediately. My best western shirt and jeans, so new they turned my panties faintly blue from the dye, felt like a silly costume. “You look real nice, in that dress.” It made me think of Granny always trying to cajole me into a dress.

“I wear a uniform at work, so I splurge a little on clothes to wear when I go out. I’ve seen you at the bar a handful of times. Tonight you look especially nice yourself.”

“My clothes seem all wrong, place like this.”

“It’s fine. A big city has all kinds of people, after all.”

After we ate—I let her recommend something for me and it was so good!—she invited me to her place. Was she a lesbian wanting sex? Was I? Marisol Ramos’s finger and lips was pretty much all I ever did with another person. I liked girls just fine, but never kissed a one. Boys either.

Mainly I was too poor to take a person out, and nobody should see where and how I lived. Only nice thing I had was an oriental rug that I helped myself to, knowing it was stealing even though Saul was dead and would never know. He probably would have given it to me if I’d asked; it had a weaving flaw running the length of it, a strip of orange threads that should be dark red.

Her apartment was small but nice, the kind I once dreamed I’d be living in. She opened a bottle of some white wine, and we talked and drank, laughing a lot. We went for a walk to clear our heads, and when we stopped at a fountain in a big plaza outside a high rise office building, she gave me a quarter. “Make a wish, Trinity.” She threw her coin in. “Do you want to know what I wished?”

It was going to be sex, I figured, but I played along. “What?”

She blushed so much I could see it in the dark. “Never mind. It’s the wine. Besides, don’t you have to keep wishes a secret for them to come true?”

“Only the one you make when you blow out your birthday candles. You can tell me.”

“I don’t know. It’s that I have what they call ‘special interests.’ They’re so… weird.”

I laughed. “In case you haven’t figured it out yet, the world’s full of weird. What did you wish?”

Her voice was so low I leaned in to hear. “I wished I could give you an enema, Trinity.”

“That so?” The familiar excited feeling arrived strong, at nothing more than the thought. I hadn’t had an enema since that last night at home, so hot and soapy I was almost crying—and I don’t cry.

She nodded but looked afraid, or maybe ashamed. Both, I reckon. I threw my quarter into the fountain.

“And you? What did you wish?”

“After you’ve given me that enema—as many enemas as you want—I get a good whippin’ for wanting it.”

She gripped my hand hard and started back the way we’d come. In her nice apartment, she marched me to the bathroom like I was in trouble. I liked that.

She had me on my side, on a towel, for that first enema, almost like a doctor, my modesty preserved, my dignity kept whole. It wasn’t too soapy or too much or too hot or too anything, except maybe too tame. I understood; she didn’t want to scare me off.

So after I’d emptied myself and opened the window high up on the wall, which took a good bit of muscle but let in clean cold air, I came out to sit right by her on the sofa so I could whisper in her ear. “I should get another one, bent over the side of the tub.”

“What you should get,” she said, her voice stern in a way I loved, “is across my lap for a good spanking.”

She slapped me pretty brisk, heating me up real good. After a while I needed that bronco I used to imagine, but I was also bucking on her lap like I myself was the bronco. She reached between my legs and diddled me like no bareback ride ever could, and I kind of… exploded inside.

“There, that’s better,” she said. “You’ve settled down nicely, Trinity. Let’s get you another enema.”

“You got any Vaseline? You stir up the jar with your finger real good, then put some where it’ll do the most good, then, you know, slip that finger inside, stir me up, before you start. The enema should be bigger, and hotter, and soapy. Not like to scald me or anything.”

“Oh, yes,” she said, her voice breathy. “So your complete attention is on that big hot enema filling your bottom right up.”

“Exactly right. And I have to take every bit, no matter how I complain. And when I have…”

“What? What then?”

“You make me hold it for five minutes. At least five minutes,” I amend. “I’m likely to squirm and fuss, maybe beg a little. Could be that’s what gets my butt blistered. Not literally. I have to be able to work in the morning.”

“Of course you do, Trinity. I’m not a monster. More an adventurous playmate. At worst, you’ll be a little tender and think of what we did the night before many times throughout your work day.”

“I reckon I could work if you were to find something to serve as a little paddle. Maybe a ruler or a wooden spoon? Think of you even more often, and more fondly, at work.”

But I didn’t go to work the next day. She called me in sick, said she was the nurse at Doctor Master’s office, where I was being treated for a digestive disturbance. I didn’t count the enemas she gave me, but they seemed constant. We did stop to sleep a few hours, but I woke up with a nozzle in me. By noon my ass was swollen and had some real tender welts. She had a heavy belt but didn’t have Granddad’s arm.

That night I got taken out to dinner again, a different place but nice, so I could meet her friend Mr. Masters. My western clothes were a day less fresh and just as wrong, but they both said it was fine. The stiff denim jeans that hadn’t bothered me a bit during yesterday’s dinner scraped at my tenderized butt something fierce.

After we ate, Mr. Masters ordered us rusty nails, which is hard alcohol. “I have a proposition I’d like you to hear, Trinity.”

“All right.” I rarely drink like that and feared I’d make a fool of myself.

He had an offer: Two years of being a charge—a sex worker—at a place they called The Facility, where my friend from the bar was a Night Nurse. I still didn’t know her real name.

“I’m not interested in being a whore, thanks.” I stood to go, then decided I’d walk out on a high note. “Matter of fact, I’m a virgin.”

I said it too loud, and people looked up, the whole restaurant quiet for a minute while I strode out, my head held high.

He caught up with me on the sidewalk. “I respect that, and I apologize for both of us making the assumption we did.”

The Night Nurse joined us; I reckon she’d stayed to pay our bill. “I’m so sorry, Trinity. We could certainly arrange for, ah, specialized sex work, nothing that would change your status as a virgin.”

“Beg pardon?”

“No vaginal penetration,” the man said dryly. “Guaranteed. Two years as a charge whose clients will leave you alone there, plus some sex games. We would train you and guarantee your safety, from both violence and disease. Those activities would be in the evening. By day, there’s job training in any of a number of lucrative fields.”

“I don’t know what that means.”

“Jobs that pay, Trinity,” Night Nurse said. “Jobs that usually go to men.”

“Frankly, we’re in desperate need of the trades. Plumbing, electrical, carpentry. If you have any interest, those would be the directions we’d steer you. Now, the position as charge includes free room and board, plus everything you’d need, even clothes. Medical and dental.”

“And these clients I see at night, what are they going to expect?”

“Something very like we did last night and all day,” Night Nurse said. “We have a number of clients who are into anal activities of every kind. You’ve shown me how much you enjoy them yourself.”

“Yes’m. I do. I did.”

Mr. Masters said, “We hold your pay and tips, showing you an accounting once a month, and when your contract ends, that money and the interest it’s earned is yours, unless you want to renew your contract.

Which I did, every time it came up for renewal.

I’m in my fifth year here. They sent me and two other charges to learn electrical systems, and together we’re slowly upgrading everything at The Facility building, starting with the wiring so old it poses a fire hazard. My days are full with that work, and I’m good at it. When—if—I ever leave here, I’ll be able to get a good job anywhere I want to go.

But I may not be able to get the other things I need, which is people as interested in my butt as in breathing. My clients are both men and women, mostly older. They all know they’ll be cut off, never allowed to visit The Facility again, if they take my virginity, but other than that, they can do almost anything.

Mostly they want to pretend I’m a naughty tomboy, a role I was born to play. The Facility bought me overalls and some rodeo-inspired western wear, although I can barely ride. I get scolded while being spanked over their knees a lot, sometimes paddled until I’m squawking while still refusing to apologize for whatever we’re pretending I did.

Quite a few decide they’ll wash that bad attitude right out of me, with an enema I pretend I really, really don’t want. Knowing what’s going to happen sets me buzzing like in the old days when I’d have to climb a tree and ride a limb like a bucking horse.

Mostly the clients touch themselves, but don't touch me that way. A few of the men fuck me in the butt, which I pretend hurts but doesn’t really. I like it. Sometimes getting it up the butt is enough to make me come, but not usually. After I say goodbye to the client and tell them I really learned my lesson, I go see Night Nurse for one last enema. She has all these recipes for punishment enemas that make me cramp or burn or both, and she’ll touch me where I need it.

What I don’t need at that point is to be sent to Corrections after, but she does that, too. It’s always a strapping. When Daniel is on duty, before he starts he loads his finger with something that feels like Vaseline but smells like menthol, pushing it right up my butt. It burns my butthole and inside. “I can send you back for another enema,” he says, “if you need me to. Just say the word.”

Usually I do. I can come a lot of times now, and I like it so much it’s ridiculous.

The Masters provide blue coveralls to wear while we do electrical work, but when it’s not unsafe, I prefer the nightshirt with the back clipped up, showing my welted ass and sometimes a butt plug. I still like admiring eyes on me.

I don’t miss Texas one bit.