, September 19, 2025
Female Small Business Owner
Pink was out. Girls like STEM now. Girls are small business owners. Girls run cults. Girls write true crime. Girls are vice presidents in pantsuits. Just not pink ones. I like wearing pink. And purple. There’s a certain shade of purple I’m desperately looking for. I want it so bad it’s almost a craving. There’s joy in seeking out a certain pleasure and finding that it does indeed taste just like you imagined it would. Crafting an outfit you spend weeks putting together, tripping for the first time on good acid, sending a punishing text to someone who’s hurt you, finding the book you’ve been looking for on a dusty shelf at East Village Books. New joy isn’t static, it expands like lilac-colored slime. Almost lilac, but not quite. It’s not exactly that pale Easter egg shade of purple girls wear to their yearly Episcopal outings. The problem is that it’s not a color, it’s a feeling.
“We need an extra pair of keys,” my boss said without looking up from her laptop. It had a neon-green shop local sticker on the back. I worked at a kid’s clothing store in Tribeca, so the office was a back room full of pests. At night I heard rats chewing through the copper wiring. Little denim overalls and floral dresses hung in neat rows. Technicolor toys, gadgets, and gizmos glistened on white tables. My boss was stirring a spider into her coffee, watching its legs dissolve like pepper. She wore a shirt that said female small business owner in red Arial font.
One night a sleep paralysis demon had assumed the form of my boss. But she was just as scary in real life considering she was an incompetent person who handled payroll. Sometimes she forgot to pay me. Other times she made me repeat my deadname over the phone, crowing like a vulture.
“Who are the keys for?”
“The repair man. Did you hear about the oil supply in Canada?”
“I was just listening to something about that on my subway ride,” I said.
“Oh god, was the commute awful?” she asked.
“I’ll be back soon,” I said, dull-eyed and bleary from the ketamine I’d started my day with.
I set out for the farther hardware store with the cute cashier.
The streets of Tribeca are trashier than you would expect. It’s just the stores that are nice, and the neat little cafés with minimalist logos.
A man yelled something and laughed as he walked by me, but I didn’t hear him. My headphones were maxed out. Some woman was screaming about shadowboxing her ex-lover, rolling around in the dirt and facing her inner demons. I loved women who could wrestle their darkness into words.
I couldn’t find the right words. My dream had been to be a journalist like all the other Hot Freelance Girls but then I gave up. I did not want to think a single thought ever again. For a while I pursued a pure holy feeling—like doing K in the bathroom while wearing a leopard-print tube top. After a year of Bimboism, I got rid of my chokers and bought turtlenecks. I wore all black and monochrome baby-doll outfits in an attempt to mimic the Trans-Girl Actress. God willing. I stopped reading anything contemporary. I wanted to become a premenopausal spinster. I spent hours reading classics in my shitty armchair and petting a foster cat. Anything long and tedious where women get punished. I didn’t dare post about it. Pretentious, I heard the reply guys in my head. I read sweet poems to try to feel better. I tried so hard to forget the Bible verses my mom had taught me. The silly, comforting verses and hymnals I used to erase queer feelings. Now they mocked me. Exodus had that thing about men in dresses. I lost the soothing power of poetry. I wanted a little answer to life’s wartime mystery. Instead my mind was cluttered by scraps of theology mixed with political social media maxims.
5 Ways to Abolish the Cop in Your Head!
I’d love to. But he’s very big and almighty and sometimes he wears a shepherd’s costume when he appears in my room. The worst sleep paralysis demon was the biblically accurate angel. Millions of eyes orbiting around a single sphere blazing with frightful glory.
As I walked around Tribeca, past trophy wives walking their children like dogs and auteurs sipping lattes, I tried not to think about my own mom. I was ignoring her texts just like my landlord’s. The only texts I wanted to read were from men who called me their beautiful little slut. My phone beeped when I got to the crosswalk, and I checked to see who it was. By the time I looked up I was almost a pancake. I flipped off the BMW, but it had already charged ahead, swerving to avoid two kids with Gucci backpacks.
“I’ll sue you!” a little girl in pigtails screamed.
Tribeca is a strange Charlie Brown cartoon. The kids really can sue you—or at least their celebrity-lawyer parents can.
Despite the daily recklessness I encountered, I had yet to see a car crash in New York. I’d crashed a car once. When I was sixteen, I walked out of conversion therapy and wrapped my mom’s car around a telephone pole. My therapist had said it was harder to go straight once you’d tasted the forbidden fruit. Imagine it, the fuck worth eternal damnation.
The hardware man yelled across the store about drywall while he copied the keys. He didn’t smile at me. The store smelled like mildew and steel, thousands of tools in plastic boxes and lots and lots of Spackle. When he waved me back to the counter, I saw him check out my tits. My boss got mad when I didn’t wear a bra, but she never said anything, she just glared at them. It was too dangerous for her to verbalize. I knew I was supposed to butch it up just the right amount for her—if I looked too made up she’d call me a gender traitor, but I’d be in equally hot water if I looked too manly. Balance is the key to everything, especially when you’re trying not to get fired. That morning, it wasn’t a choice, I just didn’t have the energy to look through my laundry.
My friends warned me to turn the other cheek to misogyny, especially from other women. When people said they hated women “as a joke” I looked nervous and shifted the conversation. When people said women were weak, I metabolized it, eroticized it, and kept moving. I think that made people believe I was kind.
My phone pinged again, reminding me I hadn’t read that text. It wasn’t my landlord or my mom. It was my ex-girlfriend Ash. She was still one of my best friends, even if she lived in Indiana.
girl i’m literally begging you to join the cause
i just watched three girls go down on each other
this could all be yours for the low, low cost of a plane ticket
Ash had started one of those all-trans rural communes. In college we had an on-again, off-again thing, and I hadn’t dated another trans girl since. My friend Hazel always said I was a repressed lesbian. None of my friends could understand what I saw in men.
The men I saw were carpenters, gamers, married, straight, bi, kinky, kind, cruel. I tried to stop asking questions after a while. They were all going to go home to beautiful women. Women with jobs and smooth arms and smooth thoughts. One of my exes was a freegan who taught me how to dumpster dive. Or tried to anyway. Mostly I picked at stale bagels for a week before realizing he never texted me first. Each failed lover spurred me to reexamine my skin-care routine. I walked through wind tunnels formed by huge towers hunting for high-end moisturizers. Every time I tried out a new mud mask, the Tribeca moms complimented me on my glow.
Ash sent a picture of two trans girls in latex bondage gear feeling each other up against a giant oak tree.
this is the future trans anarchists want
I didn’t realize her commune had any political affiliation. I looked closer and realized there was a deer strung up behind them.
Miss u babe
Her life took place on a different shore than mine. Everything and everyone moved for her like Moses parting the Red Sea. When people stared at her on the street she turned to them and said, “Hello!” with sunny Midwestern aggression. Meanwhile I spent hours scrolling past the Hot Freelance Girls wishing I had their bodies and copying their diets: black coffee, apple, banana, oatmeal. A stolen salad from Whole Foods. As I bit into my banana, I scrolled my phone to see if I’d updated my grocery list. I made and deleted lists. Lists of faults, accomplishments, things to do, books read, books to read, the worst fruits, cosmetics to try. I checked them to soothe myself. Once I listed everyone who had cum inside me. It was a short list: my rapist. I thought it was funny. My ex Ryan hated it. He was the kind of Brooklyn white guy to react if you critiqued the micro-identity he’d carefully formed through years of scrolling. He downplayed his Supreme addiction in favor of Male Feminist discourse, David Lynch’s coffee line, and Roberto Bolaño’s “complicated engagement with femicide and surrealism.” He asked me to go to Film Forum a few times a month and as much as I enjoyed a seven-hour movie, I usually tried to find an excuse not to.
“We should go camping sometime,” he said once. “What will you do when we run out of IPA?” I replied.
He didn’t talk to me for an hour after that. Then I went down on him and ignored the tranny porn he put on in the background. He was kind of ugly in a way that made cis girls afraid of him, but I didn’t have anything better going on. I was a good fixer though, so we carried on for a while. Eventually Ryan called me a misandrist after I told him the porn he watched was kinda fucked up. If I was a misandrist, why did I want a husband so badly? We broke up when he moved to San Diego to work for a tech firm. After he left, I karaoked Joni Mitchell songs, and my friend Xiomara held my hair back in the bathroom. Then I dated the freegan, then a boring NYU twink who took me to terrible plays about climate change. We ate ramen in silence, and he walked too far ahead of me. Afterward, I started hooking up with trans guys. Sometimes when they texted me to hook up, they asked how I was feeling first.
As I walked the rest of the way back to the store, I thought about the time Ash fingered me in a gas station bathroom off the I-5.
I realized too late how long I had been wandering around Tribeca staring at stray cats. When I walked back in the store my boss gave me a disgruntled sigh. I played with a tiny toy drum and gave her a half-hearted smile.
“Got the keys,” I said.
“I’m going to the bank,” she said. “And I’m getting a salad. I think I’m just gonna take a long lunch.”
As soon as she was out the door, her strappy sandals clicking on the sidewalk, I opened the store computer, signed into my email, and tried to write. It was my favorite thing, journaling about the depression walks I took in search of hazelnut coffee. My friends did not tell me the things I wrote were good, but they did say congratulations with the strained voices of people bored at a party. I thought I understood the college graduates who cynically moved in and out of the city, kissed one another on rooftops, never invited me out, and fought for the same three entry-level media jobs. I looked down on them. It was easy to be principled when no one was offering me anything.
I was debating whether or not to take a babysitting gig when my boss came back in with a soy matcha latte. The foam was full of shredded psychoactive mushroom bits swimming around like ancient ocean bacteria. Almost no one had come in all day. I spent most of my time reading about the Famous Trans-Girl Actress’s affair with a married cis man.
“Well. How’d we do?” she asked, tapping her nails on the plastic lid of her drink. I could tell by the way she grasped the cup that something was off.
“Fine. Not too many people came in.”
“How many?”
“I didn’t count,” I lied. She wouldn’t like the answer.
She sighed and sat down on a pink metal chair. “I think we’re going to have to close.”
“What?” I jerked.
“We haven’t had that many sales. The pipes in the basement burst. I can’t afford it.”
There had been no warning, no indication. Every so often my paycheck was a few days late but that was beyond normal. Just how things went in bureaucratic America.
“How much do you have in the bank?”
“I don’t have enough for payroll.” My boss looked over at me with a single tear in her eye. Her icy demeanor melted into a heroic display of grief. She started apologizing, hysterically fighting back sobs. “It’s just such a bad time—and I know this is awful. I have to think of my kid, I have to make sure everything goes well for her.”
“For her,” I said.
I thought about flashing my tits but merely flipped her off instead. She wasn’t worth it. I stormed out and called Hazel, furious at the indecency of my boss. I was the aggrieved party, I was the one who would struggle.
“I just got fired.”
“What?”
“I got fired,” I yelled into the receiver. The heat of my anger surprised me.
“Jesus,” she said. “Well, let’s go out. Blow off steam.”
“I don’t want to go out, I don’t know what I’m gonna do, babe. I don’t have any money. Not really.”
“Let’s meet up tonight, I love you, I’ll send you the party details.”
She hung up before I could say more. I loved her but she wasn’t always a feelings person. She liked to do.
None of my friends had stable careers, but Hazel sometimes showed her work at galleries and got invited to things. Hazel made horrific, many-eyed plastic dolls with crow feet and sold them to the girls. Sometimes she made fuzzy abstract paintings, and we all trudged through the rain and sleet, under the J train and past the McDonald’s, to go look at them. I would grab a giant Diet Coke and sip it in a lavender velour hoodie as I stared blankly at her work.
I already knew what Hazel would say about Ash texting me again. Though they’d never met, everyone knew about the riptide she created in me. I was always in Ash’s current, wondering what type of trans-girl nation she would build. Like Charon, she would ferry me across the Styx and I would let her usher me into paradise. Even hundreds of miles away, she called to me like a siren. I thought she would feel like home forever. She was always the one who helped me carefully craft texts back to my mom whenever I didn’t go back for Christmas.
I spent the afternoon looking at flyers in a park calculating how long I could last without a steady paycheck. Not long. I couldn’t ask my mother for money, I didn’t have the allure or stamina it took to do cam work, and I wasn’t sure I had anything valuable to sell. Not eating seemed like a bad option and would probably only make the money last slightly longer. Female-run business, they said, it will be less transphobic. You’re less likely to get fucked over. I didn’t want to look for a new job. Much less learn to please someone else’s punishing sensibility. I texted a few of the Tribeca moms I babysat for, hoping someone needed something that day.
The “all good for today but” texts trickled in as I sat on a park bench watching a gray bush of feathers stumble around pecking at crumbs. Beside me was a coughing older man eating a bacon, egg, and cheese. A group of kids walked by on their way to kindergarten. The teachers had them leashed together like reindeer. On Tommy, on Kaiden, on Arcadia. One mom ended up asking me if I could pick up her hair dye. On the way back to her house I looked at her Amex receipt. It was over a hundred dollars.
I wished I had another bodega coffee. I love awful sugar replacements, stevia and aspartame are addictive. An old woman in a pink Chanel suit was dropping sunflower-seed kernels for the pigeons across from me. We were in a competition. Her lipstick was a little off, so she looked like a clown too. She was a prune. A pink bouffant prune-shaped clown.
By four I was optimistic. I resolved to get fucked. It’d been a minute. Sex always seemed like the magic release valve. I decided to reach back out to Max. He didn’t do a lot during the day. I wasn’t even sure what he did at night. Something carpentry related. We got together after the boring freegan and I broke up so I had low expectations.
u around?
hey babe what’s up? just going down a Wikipedia hole on dogfighting
of course
i’m a little wet
i was thinking about the last time i saw u
you better be wet for me
why don’t u come over in an hour?
An hour later we were on Max’s roof. I saw the gray mirage swaying below us. In the distance I saw Manhattan, each tower an icon for some big banking company.
I’d dressed up. I was wearing black lace thigh highs and combat boots. A short black PVC skirt, no bra, and a thin red shirt. I’d toned down the makeup. I wasn’t trying to go overboard, just suggest the part I was playing.
“You look nice,” Max said. “How nice?”
Max got close to me and knocked me down to the floor. I forgot how strong he was. He started biting my neck like a crocodile before working his way to my tits and then commanding me to take off my blouse. As I flipped it over my head, my tits slipped out, and he smiled devilishly, squeezing them in his hands before looking for the flogger he’d discreetly brought up with him. He showed it to me, asking, pleading.
“Sure.”
I liked seeing my tits turn into a red mess. If he had anything to tie me up with I would’ve requested that too, but he wasn’t a proper dom. Max had me get on my knees. It was time to shake my ass. I briefly wondered if the neighbors would hear before I gave in and yelped.
“Yes, baby.”
It was his turn to be serviced. He facefucked me while I was on the ground. It didn’t last that long—he didn’t wait to cum before sliding my legs over his shoulders and burying me in his mouth. I was over it long before he was. Good pussy doesn’t dissociate.
“Hey, I think I’m okay . . . ”
I guess he didn’t hear me, he was moaning so loud. Sex, I know personally, is not about thinking. It’s an ego death, sure, but in the most selfish way possible. When people describe the feeling as pure, they’re trying to stretch their vocabulary to find another word for dissolve. It doesn’t happen every time. But sometimes I can turn into the same white noise I listen to when I fall asleep.
“You serve our community,” Max said when I’d told him I mostly fucked trans guys.
Ryan never said things like that. He was a menace. On our first date, I brought Max the weird energy drink he liked and played with his gecko. Trans guys always had weird pets. It was hot to me. Whenever I tried to date another girl, she just asked for yerba maté and tried to show me noise music in her impossibly messy room.
I was drifting in and out of my body. He didn’t know what he was doing. I’d miscalculated. His roof was crammed full of potted plants. Wildflowers, browning ferns, and an empty birdcage. He didn’t seem like a florist, but maybe his roommate or one of the other tenants had the green thumb. I couldn’t focus on what he was doing. I felt ticklish. His mouth scratched like gravel. I wanted to dig. I got him to switch to hand stuff using a gentle tug.
“Are you gonna be a good girl for me?”
He wanted me to finish. Misogyny is expecting too much of a woman. Feeling no better, I was forced to explain dissociation pussy to Max.
“I’ve been really out of it lately,” I said. “It’s like I can feel something bad is going to happen.”
I picked at a forget-me-not, mashing the blue petals into a gritty paste.
“Are you okay?”
“Yeah. Why wouldn’t I be?”
“Should I, like . . . walk you to the subway?”
It was probably better that I didn’t sleep over—no room at the inn, and his room was a mess of tattoo-gun needles and ramen packets—but the offer still would’ve been nice.
“No, it’s fine. I can get there on my own.”
I walked to the subway. I heard motorcycles in the distance. Sex had to taste like metal to be good. Or that’s what I told myself to get over my inability to get wet. When Ryan and I were together he always wanted me to take Viagra. It worked a little, but it made me feel like shit. Stuff like that made my vision crimson.
While I was alone on the platform, Max sent me an apologetic breakup text. Even though we’d only hung out twice he’d framed it explicitly as a hard ending.
“Fuck that,” I yelled.
I didn’t even care about him. I wanted to get dicked down and score a free meal and instead ended up bagging a feelings text. I had no feelings. I boiled them down in an inner well of resilience. Trans girls are immune to criticism. Not because we’re superhuman but because we have already been criticized into the margins. I have no heart, just a bunch of cybernetic mixtapes and failed Grindr hookups stitched together in the shape of one.
Last Valentine’s Day, a few weeks after me and Ryan broke up, I saw a guy who dressed me in a rubber suit and edged me. Edging isn’t very fun when you already barely cum. When I tried to leave, he started telling me about his band. Somehow every cis dude has a math-rock band and thinks their record will “get you into it.” It’s impossible to say you just came over to cum. If I could order a McOrgasm, I would. Instead, I am attempting to garner connections to DJs and vagabonds. Don’t get me wrong, I love the right kind of vagabond. Maybe Ash’s promised land would hit the right spot. Maybe giving in was the right move. There was something about her.
The subway still hadn’t come but the tracks were moving like a smooth, silver river. I tried to look closer but couldn’t make out what kind of trick the light was playing. I heard the train coming as I saw through the light beams. Snakes. A river of silver snakes moving toward the other mouth of the tunnel. I heard them screaming as the train screeched to a halt and slid open for me.
Ash sent a voice note. She was going to wear me down until I responded.
“We’re not a cult. It’s nothing like what you went through. We’re not dogmatic. We’re all about creating a separate freedom. We just got a cow actually. One of the girls here got a license to carry and started teaching us how to shoot.”
I wondered how one milked a cow. Then I thought about how my mom always told me that I should learn how to shoot. She started bugging me about it after the Pulse massacre. I dreamed of trans women showering together and licking AK-47s. Too many people were crowding my daydream. Pushing clowns, angels, and moms out of the way, I typed a message back to Ash.
I miss you too babe
“Female Small Business Owner” is an excerpt from Herculine by Grace Byron, to be published on October 6 by Simon & Schuster.