Sherbet The Mouse

I hope somebody tells Simon it's the '5-second rule' not the '5-minute rule.' Gross.   

Welcome to season 2! Simon doesn't have a new voice actor, my voice actually changed that much. If you want to find out why, check out my TikTok @noahcoreyc, or find me on Twitter @hellish_bedtime.   

Thanks for listening! <3    

Transcript

*The sound of crickets and frogs*

"Simon, speaking with his voice from season one*  Hi Grapes. Are you okay? I-

*Splat sound* *The sound of Simon yelling* *The sound of Simon swallowing something*

*Simon again, but with a much deeper voice* 

Okay, that’s better- Ahh? Oh! My voice. Oh? Oh! [playing with voice] Hmm. Okay. 

Hi Grapes. *clears throat* I was going to ask if you were okay, because you keep changing color, but then - *clears throat* I dropped my voice. I’ve been carrying my voice, like, in my hands, and I dropped it. On the ground. *Coughs* The floor’s filthy, too - so I just picked it back up, and it was kinda covered in lint, but I figured it was fine…

*clears throat* *Coughs* 

I guess the five-second rule doesn’t apply to your voice. 

*The sound of a train passing*

Aluminum Linoleum, aluminum linoleum - 

Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers.

A peck of pickled peppers Peter Piper - Hmm.  

When we met, I told you I was a guy, remember? Like, I said, so this shouldn’t be a surprise, or - 

*sighs.*

I’m changing. 

Grapes - I’ve had [laughs coldly] I’ve had a very long day. Like - do you ever have a day that feels like seven months? Seven months of breathing and waking and sleeping and promising to do better -  Like, in that amount of time you could graduate college, get a job, get laid off the job, write a book, move to Seattle, and then start, like, a whole new job? Like, seven months is enough time to change completely - or just enough time to not change at all? Or maybe both. 

Seven months is a long time. 

My day felt like it took seven months - and time doesn’t exist in hell, so maybe it did. And I sound different now, I guess. And I look different. 

I actually [laughs] I look really terrible right now, because I kinda had a rough day, and - and parts of me just started popping out of me. Like, I sort of turned inside out? Ish? 

That’s why I had my voice in my hands. I was talking to embarrassment, and then - well, I sort of had a lump in my throat? Like you do when you get really upset - I was so upset that I felt like I might sob if I opened my mouth, but I had to open it anyway, to say… Well, it doesn’t matter what I was going to say. I opened my mouth and the lump pushed its way up and out of me, and then I was holding a burning coal. And I couldn’t talk. And embarrassment has seen this happen before, apparently, so she let me come stay here ‘till I feel better.

[Quietly] We’re in Embarrassment's house right now. We’re in a room in the back - and Lemon...do you remember Lemon? The little girl with the missing friend? Lemon was right about Embarrassment’s house. The floor is a thick carpet of clothes, and the walls are covered with layers and layers of unidentifiable knick-knacks. There's big windows in this room, though. And lots of plants - plants that have crickets and frogs in them, apparently. And it [laughs] it really smells like weed. 

It’s all kind of comforting, actually. 

She said I could hang out in here for a little while. Until all my insides were inside me, again.   

[...]

[quietly] I like my voice, now. 

When we met, I told you I was a guy. When I was on earth, this is closer to what my voice sounded like. Like, a lot closer. 

I’m glad it’s back. 

It’s funny because I’m actually holding my gender identity right now, and, well. It’s weird - it looks like a loose wool sweater, but that’s not the weird part - what’s weird about it is the color. It’s not a color humans could see, but...It’s what you think blue looks like when you’re a little baby and you hear the word blue, but you haven’t actually seen blue yet, if that makes sense. 

I’m also holding my self-esteem, and my left lung - which, like - [laughs] none of those are supposed to be outside of your body, but whatever. 

[tired laugh] The gender identity and the self esteem make sense, but I don’t know why I have lungs. I’m a demon. I’m dead. I breathe, I guess, but I don’t need to breathe, so... [laughs]

My days. I’m a mess. 

Okay, so, my incorporeal form really fell apart. And by the looks of you, you’re changing too - which is wild, because. Well, obviously, you’re dead. You probably think you’re alive and I’m pretend - but really, you're a dead, incorporeal soul, trapped inside a grape jam jar, dreaming your life over and over. And - you know, you’re in hell.

I guess you can still change, though. In your dream. Because you changed color.  Your soul changed color.

I wonder what's happening to you, in there. 

I’ll tell you what happened to me. 

This morning - well, Hell doesn’t have mornings, but I’m going to call it morning anyway, because that’s when I woke up. This morning I was fine, and I went to the congress of Devils, to Surrender, because that’s my job. Remember? A man kidnapped me and sacrificed me to Surrender, to be a demon, and her servant? That happened.

I mean, I guess I was talking to you about that yesterday, when we were trying to clean all those squids out of Surrunder’s attic. And I told you about how this guy performed a demonic ritual and tried to make me eat my own heart, but hearts are really hard to eat, so he had to microwave it like a plate of dinosaur chicken nuggets. 

It feels like it’s been seven months since we talked about that. 

Anyway, today started off kind of nice. Surrender was ignoring me, which was awesome, because I could stand there and look helpful without actually having to run any errands for her. Pride and Hedonism - they’re devils, but they aren’t on the council of devils like Surrender, because they’re retired or something...I’m not sure. I know Pride owns a bar, and they’re dating. Either way, Pride was giving a presentation on how Lucy could defy god’s will and eradicate hell’s remaining economy. 

And I think Hedonism was just there to cheer on her girlfriend, honestly. Which was sweet, but I don’t know if Pride really needs it, because. Well, she is Pride. ‘Pride’ is her whole thing. 

It was cute, though. Anyway!

Surrender kept interrupting her, like...obviously she was mad about Pride’s idea, but Lucy - you know, Lucifer - she liked it. [laughs] It’s really easy to tell when she likes something, because she’s a giant cat, and she starts purring. [laughs] And sometimes if she’s really happy she’ll close her eyes and lick her nose. But - like, in a dignified way. 

So, Lucy was really happy, but Surrender hated Pride’s idea. 

And, after Pride was done. Well, Lucy wouldn’t listen to Surrender, so after the congress, Surrender took me back to her office. 

She was mad. She was really mad that Lucy wouldn’t listen to her, and. And she had this...idea. And she wants me to help. 

[quietly] And I don’t want to help. 

And I told her that, and…[upset] She yelled at me. 

And the thing about Surrender yelling - it’s not like just, getting yelled at. I’ve worked in retail before. I was the assistant manager of a 7-eleven. I went to ...school, as a child. [laughs] I’ve been yelled at plenty. And honestly, until I worked for Surrender, I didn't think anyone was better at yelling than middle-aged, white women with $70 highlights and an expired cupon, but…

Surrender - ...Do you remember getting yelled at as a little kid? Like, your parents were definitely going to get a divorce - but you didn’t know that yet, because you were seven. And being seven was stressful in general, because you were ‘too old for light up ninja turtle sneakers’ but too young to process the fact that your parents hated each other, so. You know. You’re seven. You pretend to be a cat, and you eat a whole bowl of cat food, and then throw up all over the bright blue living room carpet. You know. Because you’re kind of confused about the state of the world. 

But then, you get yelled at. And when you get yelled at as a kid, it’s by someone who’s known you your whole life. Like, you’ve only been alive for seven years, and this big person is very angry at you, and they’ve been there those whole seven years. They’ve seen every embarrassing, vulnerable, awkward thing you’ve done. They know you to your core. And they yell at you like they know you to your core.

[Quietly] That’s what Surrender’s like. She’s this twelve-foot-tall, eternal, ageless deity that knows pretty much everything, and I’m. Well, I’m me. 

[Upset] When I died, I was twenty-two. Which I generally feel very grown-up about, until she yells at me. 

I guess, when I was seven, I felt very grown-up too. 

[forced laughter] You know, [laughs] with that cat food story - I put milk over the cat food, and ate it with a spoon. [Laughs] I was pretending to be a ‘tuxedo cat,’ so I ate all this cat food like cereal. Like a gentleman. 

Anyway, I - um. Surrender said...Well, I said I disagreed with her idea, and she said - [laughs] She said a lot of things. I tried to use, like, a hyper-specific metaphor to explain why I thought maybe her idea wasn’t great, and. Well, I guess Metaphors and stories aren’t that different. But she thought I was telling her a story. 

[quietly] I guess it sort of was a story. About Isaac. And about how I should have gone to heaven. 

But she said, “Ahh yes,” She has that dumb, old American movie star accident. She said, “I’ve heard about your stories for the jar - let me tell one. Let me tell the shortest Simon story: Once there was a monster! And he was terrible and scary! But then people loved him anyway! Ahaha the end! *pause* *teasing* Did I do it? Did I nail it? You said Isaac always tells stories about animals? Simon, you always tell gender-non-conforming horror stories about monsters that want to hold hands! "

And I’m just standing there, in her office...and her office is made out of all these gold gilded bones. Floors, walls, everything. And I say ‘office,’ because that’s the english word they use for it, but it’s massive. It has columns. So I’m just standing there, staring past here at a golden skull that looks very small, and very human, and I say…’I like sweet horror stories.’ Which is true. 

And she said, ‘Yes! Of course! And that’s why you make up stories about abominations who secretly and desperately want to be treated with love and human decency. Ghosts who befriend little girls? Giant murderous owls [sugar sweet] who just want some friend-d-ds? 

But you won’t open up to see if people will treat you decently! Even in hell, you just try to fit in, be perfect - no. No, you don’t want to be perfect, you want to be bulletproof. You’re internalizing your pain in hopes that you’ll fit perfectly into a flawed society that openly hates you. Your idea of perfection is violent. It’s more violent than I am, and more flawed than Lucifer herself. 

And even if you could achieve perfection, no one is immune to pain, nor should they be. It’s absurd that you think you’d get to heaven, knowing how heaven works. It is absurd to think that swallowing yourself your whole life would lead to less pain than being hated by some people. Even now, in Hell, you’re pursuing this deeply violent, hateful idea of perfection - you’re trying to live up to a standard created to specifically exclude you. Like for god’s sake, eat a piece of pie and kiss a man. And help me with my plan. Enthusiastically."

And I said I didn’t think all those things were morally equivalent. And I kept staring into the eyes of this golden skull, and trying not to listen to her. 

She said they’re not morally equivalent. At least she agreed with me on that. And then - and then [upset] she said, ‘kissing a man and assisting a murderer also aren’t equivalent, but you’re more worried about your feelings for Isaac than that farmer you killed. '

And I...well, she told me to shut up. It doesn’t matter what I said.

She asked why I was equating murder and homosexuality. 

I said I wasn’t. 

She told me to shut up again. 

She said It’s because I’m from a part of America that glorifies murder but condems blowjobs. She said, ‘that’s the moral standard you hold yourself to. You were nine when you first shot a gun, and you were nine when you watched Pirates of the Caribbean over and over because of Orlando Bloom, and you never took the time to deconstruct why you reflexively celebrated violence and condemned love, and you held yourself to that reflexive moral code instead of creating your own. And then you died. And you went to hell. '

And I said, 'God didn’t judge me, you sacrificed me, so we don’t really know if I would have naturally gone to hell,' and she. She said, ‘I think we do know.’  

She said, ‘Simon, if you had been born and lived and died in LA, you would have gone to heaven. But you were born in a small town in Idaho, and you died in a different small town in Idaho, and you thought if you could fold yourself up and tuck yourself away, nobody would notice that you weren’t straight.'

And I said I am straight. 

[Sigh]

I remember when I was seven, one of my friends said that, when his dad yelled at him, he’d stare at this mole on his dad’s chin - and it just looked so stupid that he’d laugh. And his dad would yell more, but he’d laugh anyway. 

So when my dad was mad at me for. You know, eating cat food with a spoon, I tried to find something funny. I really did - he was kind of a funny-looking guy, to be honest. So it shouldn’t have been hard. I tried to find something to laugh at, but in the moment I just couldn’t do it, and I just started crying. 

I didn’t start crying in front of Surrender, obviously. 

[pause]

Do you want to hear your story?

I didn’t write it. I - I walked out of my meeting with Surrender, and I was like...Well, I looked like I would if you were watching me with those old fashioned, paper 3D movie glasses, with the blue and red overlapping and breaking everything’s lines. I was sort of shifting, and flickering, and all the wrong colors. And Embarrassment saw me. 

We talked a little. 

She looks like a skeleton, and she was dressed like a 2007 emo boy, so she’s [laughs] she’s easier to talk to than the other devils. 

So, yeah. We talked a little bit. She pointed out my body was changing, and I looked down, and. Well, I realized my body was changing, and I couldn’t do anything about it, and that’s when my voice fell out. My skin shifted and flipped around.

My lungs look like they’re made of glass. 

When I was alive, I used to wish I didn’t have a body. And now that I look like this, I…

I just want to feel like myself again, Grapes. I don’t know if I can, but I want to. But...Well, I don't really know what ‘myself’ was.

Anyway, Embarrassment wrote your story. I hadn’t directly talked to her before, but she heard Surrender yelling at me. And she heard about you, apparently, so she wanted to give you a story. She actually passed on a story Lemon wrote, too [laughs][paper sounds], which is really sweet. I’ll read that one to you next time. Embarrassment said I should read her story before Lemon’s. 

Here’s Embarrassment's story - it’s in a twist-top glass bottle. She said I could drink it, and the story would possess me and tell itself. So. [laughs] Bottoms up. 

[bottle/drinking sounds]

[Simon’s voice, but Embarrassment's narrative style. She sounds like a first-grade teacher reading a picture book.]

Once upon a time, there was a mouse named Sherbert. Ever since Sherbert was a little mouse, he knew there was something slightly wrong with him. 

He was only half an inch tall the first time he noticed it. His parents ran a mouse bakery - so he was always eating sweets, and he was always caked head to toe in fluffy flour, and he and his parents were very happy. But one day, when he was half an inch tall, he found himself sitting under a big metal bowl, crying. He was scared. 

His hands looked like spiders. 

All the other mice had little pink fingers that ended in little pink claws, but Sherbert had eight thick, fuzzy fingers per hand. None of the other mice seemed to notice - his parents were very busy with the bakery, after all. But Sherbert noticed. And it scared him. 

He cried about it. But then he got bigger, and he cried less. He hid his hands in little mouse gloves. He lied about them. 

He had his first kiss, and he felt awful about it, because he felt like he was lying to the mouse he kissed. He felt like he was tricking her into loving him. But he was too scared to tell her. 

And that was reasonable. Sometimes being scared keeps mice safe.

He graduated from mouse school, and his parents were so proud of him. And his mom hugged him, and it was terrible, because he felt like he was tricking them into loving him. Because they didn’t know about his spider hands, and he was too scared to tell them. 

Sometimes mice get scared because of big, monstrous creatures like cats, or chihuahuas, or rats. And sometimes, mice get scared that other mice will stop loving them. 

Sherbert’s parents taught him how to take over the bakery, and at the end of the first day of running the bakery all on his own, he looked at himself in the mirror. And he knew he was tricking himself, because he could see a shimmer in his little mouse eyes that did not exist in the eyes of other mice. 

He had seen it in the reflection of the big metal bowl when he was half an inch tall. 

Something behind his eyes wiggled and squirmed. Something behind his eyes terrified him.

He was scared. But he took a deep breath. He knew what he had to do. Sherbert knew what was different about him. For the first time in his life, he shook himself, from head to toe. All of the flour came off. Sherbert looked at himself in the mirror. 

He wasn’t a mouse at all. He was 30 sentient spiders, covered in flour. 

[laughs]

He looked in the mirror, and he wasn’t sure if he had changed, or stayed the same. He felt embarrassed. He felt terrified. He still loved his parents, and the mouse he first kissed. And he was scared they would stop loving him - and spiders were very easy to squish, after all. 

Sherbert knew he could do two things. Firstly, he could rub all the flour back on himself, and pull on his gloves. That would be okay. Or, he could tell his family he was made of spiders, and just, really hope the other mice would be kind to him. 

Being your ‘authentic self,’ (which, in Sherbert’s case, is 30 spiders), is a very vulnerable, scary thing to be. He would have to trust the people around him to be gentle. And the people around them have to live up to that trust.

They might not. 

I’ll tell you what Sherbert decided to do: he almost started crying, and he rubbed all the flour back on. And he felt embarrassed. And that was okay. 

Simon, look - Some people are so good at lying that they forget it’s a lie. They buy into whatever system because they’re terrified, and they believe it extra hard for good measure. But if you externalize those beliefs, you could hurt other people. Does that make sense?

Like...ugh, the mouse-spider metaphor is really trying to fall apart. [sigh] I really think it would have been better with pictures.

I overheard Surrender, and here’s what I’m trying to say  -it’s not always safe to trust people with your whole self. Sometimes you have to lie, or internalize things, just to stay safe. And that’s okay. That’s fine. But you’re here now, Simon. You’re in hell, and it’s very safe here. And people care about you. And there’s no rush, obviously, but...well, it’s okay to be an abomination in hell. It’s normal to have big horns. And 17 eyes. And it’s okay to turn lavender, here. 

And...and - Once upon a time there was a monster - and he was terrible and scary. But people loved him anyway. 

The end.

...

*Simon, back in his own narrative style*

[coughing fit]

Aw. [more aggressive coughing] That was really sweet [coughing]  Oh my days apparently story-juice has a bit of a kick when it wears off [coughing dies down]

[clears throat] 

Embarrassment told me her other names - Change. Cringe. Ego Death. 

She said Embarrassment is a part of learning. And that change is a part of life.

I am changing. 
I’m turning lavender.

[pause] 

I’m scared, Grapes. Of changing, and...

The plan Surrender wants me to help with - she wants to overthrow Lucy. 

She wants to take over hell. 

I’m going to - I don’t know what I’m going to do. I’m going to put my guts back inside me, I guess. And I’m going to listen to the frogs and the crickets.

[sigh]

Thank you for listening to me, Grapes. I know you’re changing too, and - I hope they’re nice changes. I hope you feel safe, at least here, with me. 

I’ll talk to you soon.

Goodnight. 

{Transcript note: This transcript was written by a very patient snail. He got the keyboard all slimy, and he's not very good at spelling or grammar, but he tried his best. Thanks for reading.}       _(@)_\/     <3