Sissy by Annie Johnson

Perhaps if Sisyphus had thighs skinny enough to enclose between two hands / wrists skinny enough to enclose between one finger / waist skinny enough to wrap two arms around / one arm around / if Sisyphus was on Ozempic / if Sisyphus knew how to induce an orgasm / if Sisyphus heeded his sister’s warnings about inducing too many orgasms because doing so leaves you with a shiver that will never go away / heeded his sister’s warnings about ponytails because ponytails are like hand grips for rapists / if Sisyphus hadn’t shorn off his ponytail making his face take on a doughy, childish, moon-like quality / if Sisyphus was man enough to use the pepper spray his sister had bought him from the gas station without worrying about spraying it in his eyes permanently going blind / if Sisyphus was woman enough to bleed / woman enough to recognize himself in the eyes of the thin, scarred girls at the bus stop who hawked amber loogies onto the pavement and ground them beneath their dime-sized stilettos / woman enough to tell them he was jealous of their dime-sized stilettos / jealous of their pressure-free lifestyles / their liberated lifestyles / if the bus-stop girls had warned Sisyphus he needed to take three left turns on the way home from that one party that one time to shake the frat guy who was following him home / shake the socially awkward guy who, when Sisyphus refused to give him a blowjob, punched the wall so hard his knuckles left bloody kisses on the plaster / shake the sweet, slightly nerdy guy who secretly jerked off into a glass jar containing a plastic anime girl with disproportionately massive breasts every night, hoping to drown her in his jism / if Sisyphus was told, as a child, that his nurturing spirit would earn him a great career as a nurse or teacher one day / if, in high school, Sisyphus was made to rub his faux-leather clad feet on the crotch of his manager at his summer job at Five Below, only to be told that his silence was off-putting and he should aim to moan more like his favorite porn stars while he was doing it  / if he was forced to return to that same Five Below one summer later to pay off his sister’s credit card debt / if Sisyphus knew that it only worsened with age / knew, statistically, that it was more likely to feel this way than not / that billions out there, like him, carried their hungers deep inside, secretly hoping to be attacked so they finally could have the chance to be violent like a man / violent like a dog that sinks its teeth into the first thing it sees / if Sisyphus knew that there existed far worse punishments to inhospitality, to a lack of openness / if Sisyphus knew real suffering, then he would probably understand that his whole rock situation is actually pretty ideal, that there are actually tons of us up here on Earth who would take his place in a heartbeat—less than a heartbeat, a quarter-beat, a fraction, a weightlessness, the sharp intake of breath that follows every time you reach into your purse and find that your protection is not there, or worse, it’s there, but so much smaller than you remember, so much more delicate, such that it could not possibly be enough to serve as your only line of defense in a world that seems to lunge at you from all directions.

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ANNIE JOHNSON — Annie is an emerging writer from the Columbus, Ohio area. She is currently pursuing a degree in Literary Arts at Brown University. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The YoungArts Anthology, The Journal, and elsewhere. Read more at www.anniejwrites.weebly.com.

Art by ERIN BRAITHWAITE — Erin is a writer and illustrator from South Africa living in Bristol, England. She was selected as a mentee with Writer’s Block North-East and finished drafting her first novel in 2023, which has recently been longlisted in David Fickling’s Search for a Storyteller competition. Her short fiction has been published by Northern Gravy and The Amphibian, and in November 2024 she won the Wilko Johnson Writing Award via Louder Than Words Festival in Manchester. You can find her on Twitter (@EJBraithwaite28), Bluesky (@ejbraithwaite.bsky.social) and Instagram (ej_braithwaite).