English Version (from the Italian) by Caterina Nonis
☆ 2025 Eurodram English-Language Committee Selection
Bios
Tobia Rossi is an Italian playwright and screenwriter who works with the main Italian and Milanese theatres. Awards include the Mario Fratti Award with Hide and Seek (2018) (Nascondino), premiering in New York at the Tank Theater in 2022 and in London at VAULT Festival, in 2023. The play then opened at the Park Theatre, London, in 2024. In 2024 he wrote his first novel, Cosa siamo nel buio, published by Mondadori. He wrote the book for the musical Miss I-Doll (Zava Productions, The Other Palace, London, 2025). Tobia is also a story editor for tv and cinema and a creative writing teacher in Milan at Teatro Franco Parenti, Civica Scuola di Cinema Luchino Visconti and IED – Istituto Europeo del Design.
Caterina Nonis (she/her) is a director, actor and translator living and working between Milan and New York. As a director, recent credits include workshopping an original opera at Berkeley Rep’s The Ground Floor, and assisting on ATIR’s El Nost Milan (dir. Serena Sinigaglia). Other collaborations include Page 73, The Venice Biennale, The Habitat, Theatre East, Modern Shakespeare Project, Campo Teatrale, and Beyond Borders Italy. She toured the US and Italy with Kairos Italy Theatre’s The Worth of Women and has served as director and community facilitator on many projects by the Inheritance Theatre Project. Her documentary Mario was presented at CinemAmbiente Festival in 2021, and won Best Documentary at the Moviemmece Festival in 2022. Translations: Apartment 2B (KIT, 2025), I Colori della Moda (24 Ore Cultura, 2023) and numerous articles and academic papers. BFA: NYU Tisch, Stella Adler & RADA.
Introductory Note, Little Beast
“Little Beast” is a bittersweet queer tale about what happens when your partner turns into something different from what they’d been. Max and Nic are about thirty years old and have been together for eight years. They have found their own form of normalcy and family. But when Nic turns into a mouse overnight, acceptance from their friends and family is no longer guaranteed. Within the couple, the weight of actions and words shifts, as do priorities, needs, and power dynamics. The relationship is put to the test, stripped bare as its most covert toxic aspects emerge, and pushed to beyond-human territories that neither Nic nor Max had ever considered. The confessional narrative of a young man’s romantic and sexual tribulations as he is pushed to the limit by his partner’s metamorphosis. This transformation, reminiscent of Kafka, Roald Dahl and Bukowski, shows how any potential, radical and unforeseen metamorphosis in a partner can call into question needs, priorities and, ultimately, our deepest selves.
—Tobia Rossi
Little Beast
Almost a monologue
Winner of the Carlo Annoni 2023 International Playwriting Award
Note: a slash (/) at the end of a line indicates an interruption, a sudden change of thought, brought on internally or externally.
Part One
A guy with a big smile.
My boyfriend has turned into a mouse, but it’s okay.
Not as a metaphor, as in a / A / A mouse / You know what I / Exactly.
I’m sure you hear all sorts of shit so I don’t think this will … right?
Out of nowhere. For no reason, with no / One morning, that little dickhead woke up and instead of being my lovely little Nic who I adored / who I adore, I adore him / He was a… yeah.
I swear / I swear / I’m fine / He’s fine / We’re fine.
At the end of the day it’s not that big of a / It’s more like the idea of / He looks like a mouse, but he’s still /
We’ve been together for eight years / We got over the seven-year itch which is not a real thing anyway / We survived two moves / Moving is the third most traumatising everyday event / I get it / It’s life, isn’t it? It’s / Okay, he is a mouse now, but we / We have been flying the diversity flag high, right? We have fought / We are fighting for the destigmatization of the other / for his / Or her / Or their / Legitimisation.
Exactly, otherness, we love that. We adore otherness.
We live in a capital of the Western world, we know a lot of gender non-conforming people / And when I say we know them I mean we love them / We welcome change / At our age we’re not as naive as we used to be but at the same time we’re not as uptight as we’ll probably be when we’re older, our intellectual, cognitive and even emotional potential is at its peak, we are the fertile Middle Earth, so what if my boyfriend turned into / Another mammal.
What keeps us together goes / Beyond our looks / Our bodies / Of course / Our two / Our two / Hearts / They beat as one / Partners in crime / Hearts or brains / I would say souls if I believed in the intangible / I’m just saying that Nic and I are profoundly connected / And will always be, I think, connected by / Connected because of /
Who We Really Are.
So whether he’s a man or a mouse it doesn’t / Last night. We had a wonderful night / Wonderful. The usual night, a little bit wild, just the way we like it, it was typical, a typical night.
I had some friends over for his birthday. Usually when we throw parties Nic and I do the rounds and talk to all our guests, you know? We split the room, he and I never even cross paths. But that’s better, right? Those couples who are always together, 24/7? No thank you. Before bed we tell each other about our nights and it always feels like we went to two different parties and we die of laughter, he saw Alex talking to the cactus in the hallway, I spied Christian secretly checking the football scores because he was the only cis-het white man there and he’s ashamed of it, as he should be. We die of laughter, I swear.
Last night was the first real party after the / Metamorphosis.
I carried Nic on my shoulder the whole time. He used his tail to stay balanced. He’s getting really good at it. Moral of the story is we were always together. Of course. It’s not like he could have walked around by himself, he’s eight inches tall if he stands up straight / Alex almost stepped on him with his wedges. It was / Well maybe not exactly a typical night / Wild, we like it when things get / It was a really great night, seriously.
My parents came too but they didn’t stay too long. Our families get along very well, we brought them together and turned them into one big family. My parents are / They’re / My dad is trying to overcome his fear of mice. He’s still working on it. His face goes red and his hands begin to shake. My mom seems comfortable around Nic, when I told her about the metamorphosis she said well it could have been worse, he could have turned into a bed bug.
For his birthday my parents got him a Balenciaga belt. Whatever, I can’t even / He likes designer stuff, doesn’t he? Yes, mom, but at the moment / At the moment / A belt? How the fuck is he gonna / Where is he / But you have be understanding with them, they’re not used to this, they’re not / It is our duty to understand our parents, it is our duty to become our parents’ parents at some point. It’s actually very healthy, we have to accept them as fallible and highly imperfect human beings / But for fuck’s sake I mean they know he’s a mouse, but then again I’m not suprised, my mom learned Nic is a vegetarian on the day that they met and every time we come over she still makes him chicken pot pie.
My friends / Samu got him a poetry book. Sylvia Plath. Great. A few days ago he’d asked me if Nic could still read and I really appreciated that. Samu is a wonderful person, we’ve been friends since we were eleven. Crissi got Nic a slice of Gruyere with a red bow on it, Nic did not find it ironic, it felt pretty stereotypical to him and he hates stereotypes at least as much as he hates Gruyere. Later he told me it felt like the time his aunt Isa found out he was gay and told him: you better take me shopping then! But Crissi was so proud of her present and said she’s gonna write this party into the stand up routine she’s been working on to take her broken heart and make it into art as Meryl Streep said. Alex got him a teeny-tiny bespoke jumper. He took a video of Nic unwrapping it. He’s a visual artist and he said he agonised over picking exactly the right colours before landing on red, orange and yellow. I didn’t bother explaining to him that mice are colorblind, Alex was so happy, he kicked off his wedges, plopped himself on the sofa and started watching it on loop. Then the others started watching and laughing with him, they were all four gin and tonics deep, they posted a story and used the mouse filter, the one that gives you the ears and the big teeth so that they could look like Nic. They were not making fun of him, not at all, they could never, my friends adore him, they were laughing with him, they were / They /
They were four gin and tonics deep.
Nic just sat on the armchair. Up on his hind legs, amid gutted gift boxes, wrapping paper, ribbon, a Sylvia Plath book as tall as him, a tiny jumper the colours of which he cannot see, Gruyere that was making him nauseous and a Balenciaga belt.
I sit on the chair’s armrest, I open the palm of my hand, he hops on it, he runs up my arm and sits on my shoulder. He touches my ear with his snout and whispers: I like the belt. Do you think I could use it to hang myself?
I adore his sense of humour.
Blackout.
///
A flashback, or a nightmare, or both.
FUCKING HELL THERE’S A FUCKING MOUSE IN THE BED
(calling for someone o.s.) NIC!
Ew ew so fucking gross
(calling louder) NIC!
Where the fuck is he, is he up already, today I thought he / OH FUCK IT MOVED EW EW EW EW EW OHMYGOD
(much louder) NIC!!!
Is he in the shower?
(even louder) NIC!!!!!!
Where the fuck did it come from, the windows are shut, the holes in the floor, they said they’d filled them, FILLED THEM MY ASS
This is the last straw
It’s the last straw, the least they can fucking do is give us April’s rent for free, May too even, that’s the least they can do, THE LEAST
The tail looks like a worm, fuck
NIC!!!!!!
A pause.
What’s the point of mice, I mean, what purpose do they / OH MY FUCKING GOD IT HOPPED AGAIN, IT’S SO FUCKING GROSS WHEN IT HOPS, OH MY GOD IS IT GONNA JUMP OFF?
Alright, if it gets off the bed and like walks over my feet I’m gonna puke, for real, so: I’m gonna leave, close the door, leave it there, Nic will be back tonight and he’ll handle it, it doesn’t gross him out
He is a biology graduate
Should I trap it with a box? What if it pisses and shits all over the bedroom
No, NO!
Oh my god it’s on the pillow, those pillow cases are going straight in the trash
Whatever, I’m gonna shut the door and goodbye
Okay?
Okay
One, two, three, go
Action.
Fucking
Alright, I’m gonna shower and get ready
Let them know I’m running a little late / Fuck, my phone
It’s in the bedroom
WHY THE FUCK DO I KEEP IT IN THE BEDROOM, WHO THE FUCK DO I HAVE TO CALL WHILE I’M ASLEEP FOR FUCK’S SAKE?
Alright
I’ll just open the door
Yes, I’m scared, very scared, VERY
Where is it?
Is it gone?
Hey?
Please God if you exist let it be gone forever otherwise it’ll be proof that you don’t exist
My phone is charging on the shelf.
Just three diagonal steps, three, I’ll get it, and then what’s done is done.
One, two
OH FUCK THERE IT IS IT WAS UNDER THE BED FUCK FUCK
Brandishing an imaginary coat hanger.
I’ll hit it, what else can I do from here?
What if it gets angry and decides to attack me?
Fuck, it’s running away into the hall
Where are you going, little bitch?
He chases it.
It’s fast, the little fucker, isn’t it
It’s in the kitchen
Of course, it can smell the food
I’m onto it
It’s darting onto the terrace, the glass door is open, how could it know that?
Busted
Does it want to jump off?
I mean, it’s a small leap, the garage roof is right below, maybe it’ll manage
To get away
Good job Mickey Mouse, nice rescue plan, unfortunately, there’s a wire mesh fence on the railing, uh oh, didn’t think of that one, did you, you can’t get through it can you Stuart Little? Am I right, Great Mouse Detective? You didn’t think of how you can’t get through the net, Geronimo-stupid-fucking-Stilton?
That’s it. Gus Gus realised it has no escape route and now it’s turning back towards me
Why the fuck are you looking at me, Ratatouille?
That little moustache grosses me out
I could pick it up and throw it off the balcony but the mere thought of holding it in my hands makes me sick like what if it runs away
There’s a heavy metal dustpan leaning against the glass door, and a sink with a hose behind the vases
Alright, I’ll smash it with the dustpan, just one direct hit, and then I can use the hose to wash away all its insides, guts, bowels, whatever else may come out when you kill a rodent
Listen, it was gonna happen sooner or later
I mean, who can say they’ve never killed an animal?
Chickens, we murder them to eat them, it’s not like they die of a heart attack
It just grosses me out but whatever I’ll clean it later
Mosquitos too, right? Some people brag about killing them, they’ll even show you when they kill one full of blood and be like, “look!”/ Let’s be serious
The way it’s looking at me right now
So still
Those little eyes so full of dread
Enough with the bullshit, it’s been real, honey.
He makes the gesture of brandishing the dustpan.
(a faint squeak) Max?
Huh? Who is it?
It’s Nic.
(looking down) I beg your pardon?
Do you mind putting down that dustpan? If you don’t kill me you’ll avoid getting our Venetian floors all bloody. And as a bonus I’ll still be alive. See? I can speak!
He lowers the imaginary dustpan.
It’s gonna be a shitty fucking day.
Blackout.
///
That smile again.
Alright, so, I have a friend, a witchcraft expert, right? She told me that in the past, to torture witches, they’d put a mouse up the woman’s vagina and then they’d sew it in and the mouse would eat the woman from the inside.
I said it to Nic and he was like: my God what a horrible punishment. For the mouse.
Irony. Irony is our saviour. If I’m not falling down to my knees, if I’m not desperately asking for help it is all thanks to irony.
I’m not saying I don’t want to ask for help, I’m saying I’m not desperately asking for help. And if I’m not desperate it is because of the type of person Nic is, a positive person, an optimist, brave / Ready to embrace change / All sorts of it.
Nic is good at / My friends always say: thank God you found someone like Nic, he knows how to – get this – ease your worries.
When I say that our life has stayed the same / I mean kind of. We go to the movies, to concerts – I let him stand on top of my head if he can’t see the stage – we eat out because don’t you know men and mice are both omnivores, mice are actually known to be man’s table companions.
As a matter of fact, we have breakfast together every morning.
The other day we went to the park and sat on our bench.
Fine, some people do look at us weird but / Sure, it’s not like everyone can be ready for / A man and a mouse to date, I mean / I’ve seen people strutting around the park with parrots on a leash, once I saw a woman with an iguana on her shoulder. She was talking to it too, you know. And by the way, I didn’t wonder about / Their intimate life, did I? Everyone immediately thinks about sex, us humans really are just / And anyway this taboo against sex between men and animals is really just a / They say it’s a crime, a violent act, I mean sure, it is not consensual. That is true. It’s a violent act because the animal didn’t agree to it. That is true. But then, do cows agree to being butchered in order to become hamburgers? I mean, did anyone ask the animal for its opinion on that? Do animals agree to have their fur torn off to make hats and belts? I’m just asking. And to spend their lives in cages so small that all they can do is stand in their own shit? Mhm? And to be pumped with anabolic steroids, or to be forced to wear one of those hot pink, polyester dog coats that some people like to make their chihuahuas wear? We’re such hypocrites. Still, in this day and age.
I don’t know what you think about it.
The bench. The other day we sat on our bench.
We met right in front of that bench, by the entrance to the Museum of Natural History. Nic works there as a guide for children’s tours. Worked, he’s not working now, he misses it, and he also misses his salary. Which, you know, was really useful in terms of / Rent. Which we share. A centrally located apartment is not / These days, like, with the economy, the wars and everything / Anyway. He says that when the circus comes back he’s gonna bring them his cv, in case they’re hiring.
Irony is our saviour.
Sitting on that bench, we play at reliving our first meeting. The other day we didn’t feel like talking. After all those hours in the car / I drove him to see his parents and friends, when he was a human he used to go by himself but now / It’s not like he can drive or / I take his car and drive him all over the place / I’m happy to do it / I put him in a little cage, set him up in the front seat and then fasten him in. His parents live in a small town, it’s fifty miles to get there and fifty to come back, they’re so lovely, they took it well, they even got a little house set up for him in his bedroom, with slides and all, I find it very cute, Nic goes: come on. It’s designed by Angelina Ballerina. His dad is always talking to me about motorcycle brands and lawnmowers and with his mom it’s all about the used clothes she got on Vinted, she’s banking on my interest in clothing which is nearly nonexistent, anyway I don’t really give a damn about motorcycles or lawnmowers and even less about used clothes, so I’d rather just not visit with them. His friends too / I usually would rather / Not fully avoid them / Not pretend they don’t exist but just / Life is a stalled out plane, plunging us straight to our deaths, right? So why waste what precious time we have on earth with people we don’t like? All that much, with people we don’t like all that much. It’s not that I don’t like his friends, it’s just / Perhaps I just don’t like them all that much.
I ask him: Nic, what do you even like about these people?
Dunno. I love them. I’ve known them forever.
Exactly, you’ve known them forever, that’s what you like about them, it’s the only thing you like about them, you recognise them, but you don’t really like them, you wouldn’t choose them today, they don’t have a shred of your, of your emotional intelligence, feeling like you’re better than them must be reassuring, sure, but come on now we should use our intellect to choose our friends, we’re not animals for God’s sake! Oh. Sorry.
Since he became a mouse I / I’ve been cooking for the both of us. Cooking / I defrost things and throw them in the microwave. He acts like he likes that stuff, but he’s actually a good cook, he tried to bake an angel food cake but he fell into the batter and very nearly choked. I had to blow dry his fur to make the little pieces of dough come out.
We go to restaurants too, please, of course we go, but it’s not like they’re all willing to / Some don’t let dogs in, forget mice, what if there’s a food inspection.
Of course, there are also some who go crazy about us and give us a discount and ask for a selfie and beg us to come back because they’ve never had customers like us.
No shit.
At night, he’s exhausted. Which isn’t the best, because I work at night, into the night, I have to stay focused and looking after Nic has become a bit / You can imagine, right, a bit / I generate content. I’m an editor and I write articles but at the moment I’m pursuing my first publishing project. The book is going to be released soon, it’s a collection of interviews with famous gay couples called Men Who Marry Men. Though I’m considering doing away with that “who” because relative clauses can get tricky so it’ll be Men Marry Men.
It’s cool, right? So like, I invite these famous couples over, “famous” so to speak, we sit at the table, I perform my best impression of Christiane Amanpour and I ask them questions on this and that. The fact that Nic’s metamorphosis would happen right as I’m writing this / This is supposed to be an important book / Maybe not important but a book nonetheless / It makes me a bit / Right? / A bit / Anyway Nic has nothing to do with it, Nic is doing what he can to help but you know / He hates feeling helpless, one time I got a forty degree fever and he didn’t know how to bring it down, so he violently slapped me in the face with a wet cloth until I passed out.
Now he frolics around the house carrying coffee cups filled to the brim to water the plants, he spends hours hopping around like he’s Fievel Mousekowitz/ I’ll take care of it, Nic, I’ll use a watering can and be done in three minutes but no, he wants to be the one doing it.
He got the rubbish to roll down the stairwell to take it out, but then one night he ran into a cat by the bins and that was the end of that.
He was so scared he threw plastic into the compost bin.
He spends his days at home alone doing nothing and I know he hates it, when I get home I ask him what he’s been up to all day and he’s like: I dunno, I read a bit, scrolled Instagram. He scrolls Instagram by running on his smartphone like it’s a treadmill.
He makes the gesture of running with his fingers.
This way I can work out and cyber stalk people at the same time. Irony is our saviour.
There’s this one thing that / Whatever / I didn’t wanna talk to him about it, no / I’d rather have / Maybe / Not right away, like / This one thing I noticed / At some point I just asked him / Just as we were about to fall asleep.
Nic. Our cupboard, the solid beech wood one in the living room. The cupboard legs are all… chewed up. Do you know anything about it?
Nothing. He fell asleep. All balled up on the pillow. Or he was pretending to sleep. I’m afraid I humiliated him. The wooden legs really are all chewed up. And my Macbook charger too. And the base of the bookshelf in the hall. I read that mice have to do this, otherwise their front teeth will grow too much and prevent them from properly chewing on food. I get it. It’s just that he’s only been doing it for a few days. I wonder if it’s, I dunno / The start of something / I wonder if he’ll continue to become more of a mouse and less of / Less of Nic.
The other day at the park I could sense that he was feeling down.
I used to stroke the base of his neck whenever his mood darkened / Now I dare you to even find the base of his neck / I gently picked him up and tucked him into my sweatshirt’s neckline. I did it on impulse. He just stayed there with his little paws peeping out of the zipper. He was like: you’re that bitch Snowwhite and I’m one of his fucking squirrles.
We laugh. It’s our cue to begin.
He closes his eyes.
February 2016, early afternoon. You’re sitting on the museum steps and you’re saying goodbye to the fourth grade class you took to the exhibit on the Spinosaurus, the long lost giant of the Cretaceous period. You try to remember their names and mention a youtuber because you’re one of them, bruh, and you want them to know that.
I’m on a run, all bundled up, but I see you and damn you’re hot, I stop abruptly on the gravel.
The dark pink of your cheeks. The curve of your back. Your miraculously tight polo neck.
You notice me noticing you.
Your lip curls ever so slightly.
That little crease.
The children leave and you don’t have any more reason to stay, so you start kicking the dead leaves off of the entrance steps.
Once there are no dead leaves left to kick off of the steps, there I am, still staring at you, and you go: have we met before?
And that’s why you claim you made the first move.
And, without coming closer, despite all the people coming and going between us, I answer: no. I’m just staring at you. I know we teach children they shouldn’t stare but I disagree. I think we should stare if we’re interested in something. Or someone.
You’re impressed.
A woman sitting on the bench, do you remember her? With a brown faux fur coat, frizzy hair and a very red face? She looks up from her phone, looks at us and smiles. Her teeth were yellow, remember?
You laugh at my remark and go: my bosses make me buy a coffee for all the people who linger around here. Would you like a coffee?
And I go: coffee with the fossils? You claim that I said that to get Yellow Teeth to laugh but it’s not true, I did it to get you to laugh.
You laugh too and go: there’s more than just fossils.
How am I supposed to know, I’ve never been inside.
I can show you around if you want.
Do your bosses make you do that too?
Yellow Teeth keeps shifting her gaze between the two of us like it’s a tennis match.
I’d like to have a look inside. But I’m a sweaty mess at the moment… I should finish my cardio… how about tomorrow?
And you say: I’m going to the lake with my boyfriend tomorrow.
And I say: you’d rather spend time with the fossils. I can see it in your eyes. And I’m not even wearing my glasses.
This is too much for Yellow Teeth, she gets up and leaves, lighting up a cigarette. Yet another, that’s why her teeth are so yellow.
I’m cold. Alright, I’m off, or I’ll end up with pneumonia at the very least.
I tell you to DM me and two days later we meet up and we know the rest.
He opens his eyes.
I can feel you, hanging onto my sweatshirt zipper with your little nails, I can feel you, a little ball of fur on my chest, I can feel you / You’re shivering.
You can feel that I can feel you shivering so you make yourself stop.
You steady your breath, as if expecting, out of the stillness, that things will go back to normal.
A pause.
I know.
A pause.
I know every moment of crisis is actually positive because it contains a death but also a rebirth, and obstacles help us grow, there’s a line in The Little Prince about this / There’s a line in The Little Prince about every fucking thing / I know it’s stupid to feel sorry for yourself and wonder why me? And since we are supposed to be the intellectually mature ones we should have the clarity of mind to wonder why NOT me? / But /
A longer, pregnant pause.
That morning I woke up to a beast in my bed instead of / Can you fucking imagine? / That morning / On the terrace / When I realised that beast was actually him / I ran away, I locked him inside and sat on the landing for three hours, plopped down on the doormat with my back against the door, staring at the wall / Fucking hell please tell me I’m dreaming / I wasn’t dreaming / At some point he came calling for me / First out loud / I wouldn’t answer / Then he started scratching at the door with those / Little nails / claws / So I had to get myself up, open the door and face / Face / It all.
So, well / Yeah / I’m here to / Yeah.
Irony is our saviour but we can’t actually be ironic about everything, or perhaps we can, perhaps we can, but there are things that have become a bit / For us / After the / We’re talking about a mouse, aren’t we? And as much as he can talk, he’s still not a human, right, as much as he’s a mammal, as much as he is man’s table companion nevertheless he is a mouse, okay?
Is there any chance that you might be able to make my boyfriend go back to the way he used to be?
He studies the audience’s silence.
I’m doing it for him.
Blackout.
///
Suddenly naked, or nearly so.
Why don’t you wanna suck my dick?
We shouldn’t give up on
I’m still really attracted to you
All I need is to know you’re the one sucking my dick
Even though now you have those, that, you’re
Why don’t you want to?
It’s not like I have a huge dick, I mean, you know that
Obviously
And I noticed that your jaw opening is quite impressive
Is it the front teeth, do you think that’ll hurt if you
When you try to
I could try blowing you, but like, what am I supposed to suck on?
I know you have a dick too
Somewhere
But how am I
How
Where will I
It’s too small, I mean it’s the right size for you, very proportionate, but for me
Same goes for your ass, you know how much I love to lick it but it’s looking like it’s gonna be a bit challenging at the moment, your ass is
He draws a tiny circle in the air.
I don’t think I ever even saw it, but surely those little black balls are coming out of somewhere, aren’t they?
Sorry, I didn’t mean to, I
It was just a joke.
If you slid in up my
Do you think you’d fit
How much would it have to
Stretch out, how much
We can try
Obviously, I’ll wash up first
Thoroughly, not like the last time.
Okay, I know we both can’t stop thinking about the mouse who got sewed into the witch’s vagina.
Yeah, I know, it makes me lose my boner too
Alright, not to keep talking about vaginas
But I did watch some porn where they put a mouse inside a vagina
And there’s this
Tube
That he uses
Like
A tunnel
So that the mouse can
But the mouse wants nothing to do with it, you know
Now, I would need to dilate significantly to get you to come inside, but I could use one of our anal plugs, you literally die of laughter whenever I use them, okay, you could use it on me, I could use increasingly larger ones until it’s stretched out enough for you to come in
Maybe just a little bit
Or you could tuck your tail between your legs and enter ass first that way you’d be more in the shape of a
Use a little lube
Rub yourself with / or plunge into the lube
Not too much though, or you’ll drown in it
Hey, it sounds kind of nice to be lubricated head to toe, no? Kinda like that Foam Party we went to in Barcelona, remember?
Let’s try
Remember how good it was when you fucked me, you used to tell me you loved being inside me, now you’d be, like
Totally, inside me
Literally every part of you would be inside me, what other couple could ever experience anything like it?
You’re not gonna choke.
If you feel like you’re choking give me a shout and I’ll pull you out
I’ll use your tail, pull you out from your tale, like a tampon, we’ll leave the tail out
I could anaesthetise my
What’s it called, that ointment to anaesthetise your ass? It’s something like /
Nic interrupts him with a long squeak.
SQUEEEEEEAAAAAAAK!
What? What am I doing wrong? I’m trying to get our sex life back Nic, I already told you you can fuck whoever you want, you know that, other / Mice / If you’re up for it, of course, you can fuck the whole city sewer if you want, but that doesn’t mean you and I can’t do it because I really really want to do it with you.
Do not start again with how “I’m not attracted to you anymore”, you used to say it before too, Nic, before the / And even though I did do it with a couple other people, it was for fun, you know, just to empty out my balls, fucks without intimacy, we agreed on that, Nic, fucks without intimacy, and that’s why I shouldn’t feel guilty, the same way you shouldn’t feel guilty if you had sex with other guys / I mean, rats. I mean mice! Whatever!
We’re too evolved to be slaves to guilt, don’t you think / We’re more / More / More /
And I’m fucking done with you just squeaking, can you fucking talk or can’t you because if you can talk please fucking talk
A long pause.
You like your silence, don’t you?
Delivering me to silence, torturing me with your silence.
And when you can’t be silent you have your excuses, you’re tired or you don’t feel like arguing, tired my ass it’s your piece de resistance, you’re tired and we should talk about it tomorrow but then we never talk about it tomorrow, is that what you want?
Well I’m not talking about it tomorrow, I’m talking about it right now.
You say that your father can’t express his feelings and that’s why he retreats into silence but that’s exactly what you’re doing right now because you don’t wanna talk about our sex life do you see how we go to Pride all chipper because we’re the best the coolest etcetera but then we can’t talk about our own feelings exactly like your father or at least that’s true of you because, and I’m sorry to say that, but I definitely can talk about my feelings, I’m good at it too, and also about sex as you can see and I think the bare minimum right now would be to both use our brains to understand how, what /
A pause to collect himself.
Now come here and get inside me
It might hurt me, me
Let me
Let me turn around
How the fuck am I supposed to
He makes a few attempts, then gives up.
Or I can just /
He lies down.
I’ll close my eyes and perhaps, I dunno
You can start by running on me, like, all over me, tickle me a bit, that turns me on, you know, with your paws, your whiskers, your tail, whatever you want, on my neck perhaps, around my groin, on my stomach, go over my dick, just brush on it, then go back to it, I’m gonna get hard you’ll see, I’m gonna get wet
Let’s try.
A long pause.
I’ll get dressed.
Blackout.
Part Two
The bar at a club.
Four AM, loud music, intermittent light.
Lots of alcohol.
Alright alright alright / The question is / No, stop laughing / Wait / Alright / The question is / Stop fucking laughing / You don’t know me, okay? / Okay / I mean you’ve known me for / Okay, ten minutes / But how do you think / that I / As a boyfriend / How do you think I am? / I think I’m not bad / Okay fine like / I could be more / Instagrammable, for sure / The hot boyz of the month page has never posted about me / At the gym / In the shower / Noone ever peeks between my legs / No fifty year old woman with internalised homophobia ever looks at me and goes: what a waste / Fine / I’m insecure / I know it doesn’t look like I am but / When I was in my twenties I used to come to clubs like this and whenever anyone approached me to hit on me I would automatically assume they wanted to rob me / I swear / Do you wanna rob me? / Okay / Fuck / I don’t feel attractive at all / Once upon a time / Once I felt attractive / in 2012 / Between March and October / Because a Dolce & Gabbana model started fucking me / Almost every day, you know / Then it turned out he was / very self-destructive / he had like a personality disorder, I’m not sure / He’d put himself through degrading experiences / Like fucking me / Anyway he started seeing a therapist / And stopped seeing me / Yeah why not let’s have another drink / On me
Nic is my boyfriend, right / He too is insecure / We both are / And flawed too / That’s cool / We talk / We have this / Rule / Insecurity breeds pettiness / When we’re about to be cruel with each other because of our insecurities we stop, we breathe, we talk through our discomfort and we try to understand where it comes from / We talk, for fuck’s sake / When he isn’t too tired and says we’ll do it tomorrow.
But then like / Why did he fucking leave?
Where did I go wrong, what didn’t I understand, why didn’t he talk to me about it and most of all HOW THE FUCK DID HE RUN AWAY IF I LOCK HIM INSIDE EVERY DAY?! I close the glass doors too, and the window overlooking the terrace over the garage roofs.
I still can’t tell if he can no longer speak or if he chose to stop speaking.
He squeaks!
I’m the one who encouraged him to move to the city eight years ago, if it weren’t for me he’d still be living with his parents in that fucking dump, I introduced him to interests he didn’t know he had, serious, cultural interests, after high school he went straight to uni where he thought studying fungi and bacteria was the best he could ever have, can you believe that. I pushed him to ask for a raise / I helped him become the best version of himself, he said that, he’s the one who said that to me, I think I gave him / My everything, fuck, and I keep giving him my everything / We do have our challenges, fine, a few hiccups here and there / But to run away like this!
I know how he did it. The bathroom window. I left it open. He must have climbed up on the washing machine, from there on the cabinet, from there on the perfumes shelf, and from there one jump and you’re out, fuck. Which like, then what did he do there, in the inner courtyard, jump up on the tree and then slide down like a pole? Like The fucking Rescuers?
Where is he even going anyway? This city hates mice as much as the next one, as soon as he transformed I googled mice, and the first things that popped up were: mice how to exterminate, mice poison, mice pest control.
I’m worried.
I told him he was free as a bird / Of course / We / We decided / We chose / When we felt attracted to other guys we decided to follow those feelings, because we adore mutual freedom and we don’t want to have to give anything up. It was my idea but he had the same impulse, he had the same impulse, he told me that, I sensed it, he told me that. We can have sex with whoever we want as long as we’re not / Emotionally involved. We’ve had threesomes, foursomes, we went to that sex club with that friend of his, Nic spent the whole night at the bar because he was scared that his friend was gonna give me a blowjob and he couldn’t bear the thought of that so I said okay we can stay at the bar, we don’t have to do anything we don’t wanna do. I was like: doesn’t it turn you on to think that like two or three men could be fucking me at the same time and he was like: no and so fine, I accepted that.
This whole escape thing / Now that I’m thinking about it / It’s premeditated. Because the last thing he told me, before he stopped speaking, was: you should move the bathroom cabinet to the other side. And like an idiot I moved the cabinet between the washing machine and the fucking shelf, which he then used to jump onto the shelf and then out the window.
I thought / I thought I’d hit rock bottom with my ex / He was really freaking crazy / A full-fledged narcissist, he checks every box from those articles about how to spot a narcissist, so passive-aggressive he’ll make you leave the house at two a.m. to get him a kebab because he drank too much and he can’t go to sleep without having had a little something first.
Like / He drove me away from all my friends because he said they were energy vampires, he made me fight with Samu who is anything but an energy vampire.
And for some reason I felt / What a fucking idiot / Indebted to him / Grateful that he had chauffeured me to a higher plane of existence, horseshit / I won’t even speak his name, I saved him in my phone as asterisk asterisk asterisk, my therapist suggested that.
I dated him because / He chose me / And I couldn’t say no, I couldn’t / He chose me
Sometimes I’d scream in his face, I’d vomit everything out on him and this vein up here would swell up like crazy, and this one too, and I hated the thought that that little red-faced, dry-throated, vein-swollen screaming monster was / Me.
I thought Nic wasn’t gonna cause me any trouble, but / being a mouse made him /
I told you he turned into a mouse, right? / Okay.
Lately it’s been / We tried to be playful about it, we went through all the classic mouse jokes plus some that we came up with, puns, our worst was sodomouse, but it turned out not to be particularly / It was all / A bit / Very / A bit
For a laugh, we’d ask each other: are you a top or bottomouse?
I’ve got nothing to do with him becoming a mouse, that much is clear, right? It’s not my fault that he became like that, I didn’t make him shrink / Or animalise or / It’s not my fault that he became like that / It was a totally /
A long pause to get a hold of himself.
I have nothing to do with it. Cheers.
He drinks and observes the guy standing in front of him.
Your shoulders are crazy by the way
Max
Nice to meet you
Sorry, I didn’t even /
Enough with the boyfriend talk
Is he even my boyfriend anymore?
You said you’re a fashion student, yeah, but don’t say it like that, don’t apologise for being a fashion student, it’s your calling, your / Sacred fire.
Stop laughing
Why are you laughing, because everyone in this city is a fashion student, sure, it’s the biggest cliché in the world, but that doesn’t mean people do it just for the sake of it, many do, I’m not saying that’s not true, many of them are rich kids, most of them perhaps, but surely some of them are, moved by an authentic desire / By ambition / In a healthy way.
I bet you have this / This / Devotion / I could tell right away from / The way you move /
The way you use your hands, the way you / Brush them on the counter.
I, let’s say I work in communication, I work with words, so I mean / When I say you sound like a guy who is burning with passion, spontaneous and who doesn’t hold back… I know what I’m saying.
Perhaps you just need a dose of self-confidence
To see the beauty that I see
After all, as Wislawa Szymborska said “on this third planet of the Sun / Among the signs of bestiality / A clear conscience is number one.”
She’s a poet
I live just around the corner
If you want to that’d be quite
What’s your name again?
Blackout.
///
Lying down, tired of speaking to a void.
… I bet you’re fucking dying out there, you fucking dickhead / Get hit by a car or run into a cat or a dog or even a raptor / And then you’re going to fucking miss me, dickhead, you’re going to miss coming over and asking me how I’m doing a million times and looking at me the way you look at a sky heavy with rain, you’re going to miss being quiet as you let me calm down after I make a scene or running to the bathroom to wash your face and breathe deeply and coming back out convinced that you can handle another one of my hissy fits and you’re gonna miss feeling guilty for all the things that you can no longer do to me and give me now that you’re just a, a / Fuck / I kept waiting for you to leave the house to fuck someone else and now I don’t feel like fucking at all / I’m trying to write but everything I write is utter bullshit / And all this shit ends up in my writing, you know? / It seeps in / My writing is shit / Men Marry Men / They’re supposed to be love stories but they’re just shitty stories / And the deadline is on the twenty fourth / IF THIS IS HOW YOU LEAVE I’M GONNA FEEL LIKE AN ARSEHOLE AND I’M NOT AN ARSEHOLE / I didn’t make you run away / I didn’t bring you to / No / Do whatever you want / I don’t care / I don’t give a fuck
A pause.
I left all the windows open so that you could come back and now I’m fucking freezing my arse / I keep checking my phone because even though you didn’t bring yours with you you’ll find a way to call if you want to / That is if you still know my number / I would get naked and let you hop all over my whole body, you can do whatever you want, really / With other people too if you want / With those animal-fucking guys, we can find them on adultwork.com / With other mice too if you want / Seriously, look, I’m happy to / Look, go ahead you dickhead, when you jump on me why don’t you bite me with your front teeth, why don’t you bite my arm, make me bleed, bite my finger off that way I’ll have a brand new pain to distract me. Actually, why don’t you bite off my whole hand that way I’ll be worse off than you / Why don’t you become a zombie mouse with bloodshot eyes, a mohawk and sharp teeth, scratch me and infect me with one of those diseases you rats carry, give me mange, I’m begging you, give me something bad enough they’ll have to take me to A&E something that’ll disfigure my face with red blisters and marks and pustules and pus until I’m totally unrecognisable and even uglier than I already am, that way for once you’ll be the one feeling hideous and grotesque and stupid and small and then you’ll be the one to come and tell me what it’s like to feel hideous and evil and harmful and all that.
Come home stupid fucking mouse.
///
Looking down, caught off guard.
A pause before he begins to speak.
Oh my God your fur is all dirty
Where did you
Where did
I’ll get the brush, I’ll
Wait, wait
Thank you for coming back, I
Thank you
I got you something
It’s your birthday present, are you ready?
I didn’t forget about it, it’s just that it took a while to find it.
But I did it.
I waited a month to give it to you and now
He takes out a pretty, golden, egg shaped box, he opens it and a small bottle emerges, full of a pink, fluorescent liquid[1].
If you drink it all in one go you’ll turn back into a human.
I found it on the dark web. Don’t ask. It wasn’t too expensive.
Mostly I had to convince them that I really needed it.
That we really needed it.
I told our story to a group of people in a dark room, I went back many times until at some point they determined that I was desperate enough to deserve this (the bottle)
Down it
Like a tequila shot
Knock it back and everything will go back to the way it was
Down it
Nic begins to speak.
Max
You’re the best for not being mad
The flat’s tidy.
The plants look a bit sad but they’re still alive.
I told you to water them in the evening, not during the day, you forgot about that but that’s okay.
What is this, a magic elixir? An antidote? Does it have a name? I quite like the packaging. The design. The little vial. I’m sure it was really hard to find.
Thank you, from the bottom of my heart, Max, really.
Are you making that face because I smell bad?
Thank you the brush yes if you could grab it that’d be great just not now okay
Maybe I’ll have a bath later
I realised that I’m very dirty, black almost, I saw my reflection on the fender of a minivan, who the fuck is that rat? Well, it was me.
That’s inevitable, after all I lived, well, obviously, with other mice, right? For how many days? They immediately saw me as one of their own. The alpha males didn’t feel threatened by me – I’m really skinny compared to them – and they welcomed me into their clan. It’s not like they did me a favour, they weren’t being generous, okay? They didn’t allow me in, they just did it.
They let me have a little square of warm soil in the hole under the park across the street. To sleep on.
You must have thought I’d gone off who knows where. Actually not.
They showed me around a bit.
They have mazes and tunnels, and wormholes, my God, there’s a whole city underneath the city, you wouldn’t believe it.
It was crazy.
Why do you think humans dislike us so much? / Dislike them. Dislike mice. Because they live in the attics?
As soon as the mice stick their snouts out of their holes and invade their spaces, humans lose their minds, this rage overcomes them which I’m sorry to say but I find it disproportionate compared to such small furry animals that at the end of the day are totally innocuous, right?
Yes, they do carry diseases, but not all the time, and they carry them the same way an infected human does, and anyway demonising a whole group because they can transmit a virus is a bit Eighties, isn’t it?
If a man sees a mouse he’ll either run or chase it away or kill it.
Why do we act this way / why do you act this way / with the things you don’t want to see, you either run or chase them away or kill them.
I dunno.
I’m not trying to say mice are perfect, they certainly aren’t, they have questionable hygiene, they tend to be messy, I’ve seen things that / You know what nevermind.
But a mouse isn’t looking for their soulmate, a mouse never went to school or to church, never saw a single Disney movie, doesn’t dream of ever finding its other half, I used to believe in that too, but now I know that when you see a person as your other half you’re not really seeing them.
And you’re not seeing yourself either.
I can talk again, see? To be honest I never lost the ability to speak, but after a while I just didn’t have anything left to say. I needed to be on my own for a bit to organise my thoughts. I’m not trying to be mean, it just takes me a while to understand what I want to say.
You know me.
Finding that bottle must have been an ordeal. You had a meltdown over the Ryanair website when we went to Berlin for the weekend so I imagine for you the dark web must have been /
Maybe it goes in the fridge, right? To preserve it, we need to keep it
In the freezer?
It won’t freeze, will it? I assume it’s like one of those hard liquors that never freeze
Or maybe it’s enough to /
Yeah, maybe it’s enough to just keep it in /
I’m not gonna drink it, Max
Sorry
I mean, I’m sorry
Max
While I was sleeping all curled up in the dirt
I had a dream.
We’re all caged up beasts. We live in a castle of cages. We’ve lived there all our lives, we were born there, and some cages are tiny. We can barely move around, it’s dark, we can’t tell night from day.
Out of nowhere, we hear a scream, a cry, a roar.
Where is it coming from? We lean against one of the barred walls and we realise the cage was never locked. Wow. And of course what do we do, we run outside, right? All of us, it’s a madhouse – paws, wings, hoofs, beaks, fins, we’d never looked each other in the eyes before, now we are one pack.
We run, I’m running too.
Outside there are the woods and the desert and the ocean and everything.
Can you picture it?
I make an animal sound but what comes out is no longer a squeak, it’s more like, I dunno, like a howl, like a roar. My coat glistens in the reflection of the moon, what kind of fucking beast have I become? Suddenly I’m growing wings, roaring louder and the other animals… they’re answering me, Max, they’re coming from God knows where.
We howl together so that the others will hear us too, to let them know that we’re here and there’s a place they can run to.
And fuck, Max, you’re there too, galoping by my side.
We’re two strange animals, you and I, funny, no, like, not funny, peculiar, unique unto ourselves, we don’t feel better than everyone else like other men do, and between us /
Your kiss is no longer a stamp of ownership, it’s just the desire to bite my lips, we feel like we are part of a new species together with millions of others just like us and what I am for you doesn’t need a name, Max.
And I realise this is the kind of freedom I used to dream of, when I was a nine year old human who didn’t know what to say when the kids at school asked me to pick which girl I liked, and I ended up choosing the one who I thought did her hair the best, or when I was twenty and I’d spend the night talking to my friend, my sweaty ear against the phone, shaking like a leaf and hoping my Prince Charming wouldn’t fuck other people at the sauna, or when I went to Pride with you, Max, marching by your side, fighting for freedom, and now I see that all I wanted was to be free from you.
But also with you.
Everything that we / That we aren’t, that we don’t want, that we despise, that negates us, that scares or scandalises or threatens us, the system, I dunno, fascism? Evil, evil. Evil is feasting on the instruction manual that governs everything that’s supposed to happen between you and me. Our enemies, right? The ones that we know to be our enemies. Social pressure, authoritarian cults, everything we’ve fought against and fight against is fueled by spying on our promises in the dark. By hissing in our ears what the boundaries of our existence should be.
We always say we wanna change the world.
We can only change the world if we change what happens between us.
I don’t know what I’m asking / Proposing / But I know that we can choose to fly free, to live outdoors, in the light, we can dance like crazy outside of our cages.
We always could.
But we didn’t do it because we were both humans and humans are /
A human being is just a /
Little beast
But right now I am what I am and you /
The average lifespan of a mouse is one to three years.
With a little courage we can make the next one to three years the best of our lives.
A long pause.
Is everything alright?
Don’t give me that face
Come on
Who’s my little mouse?
Another long pause. Back to Max.
He carefully puts away the bottle.
Okay.
No, I
Got it, it’s quite
Quite clear.
Nic
I sent my editor the first draft of Men Marry Men.
She was like: Max, we asked for stories about couples, you gave us stories about loneliness.
I was like: Sofi, every couple’s story is a story of loneliness.
It was over the phone but I could clearly sense one of her smirks.
She was like: how sad.
No, I said, not necessarily.
Otherwise, Nic
I don’t know, Nic, I’m quite
It’s all quite
I’m quite tired
Can we talk about it tomorrow? Blackout
[1] It looks exactly like the one from Death Becomes Her (1992).
The Mercurian 