PLEASE SCREAM INSIDE YOUR HEART

I love possums. I love their weird little faces, I love that they eat ticks and roaches, and I love that they clear carrion like little vacuum cleaners. They are smart, they are sweet, and they are sensible: three qualities that I value. Possums are venom-resistant tough little buggers that have survived and thrived through the course of over seventy-million years; they are our unsung heroes, and they deserve to be an icon of survival during this perilous time.

I have been making funny little possum memes as a joke for a couple of years now – combining banal internet platitudes with pictures of possums doing possum things – and when I saw the story about an amusement park in Japan reopening and requesting that rollercoaster riders refrain from screaming so as to minimize spreading respiratory droplets, something clicked so elegantly in my head: in that moment, I knew that I had found an anthem that encapsulates all the horror, confusion, anxiety, and terror that we’ve been experiencing in 2020. Superimposing this one succinct phrase onto a hissing, irate possum was the only thing that made sense to me since March of this year:

Please scream inside your heart.

This is the scent of fried dough, funnel cake, and that balls-in-your-throat feeling you get when you’re about to pitch over the edge of a steep hill on a roller coaster and can’t see the other side.

Illustration by Drew Rausch for Black Phoenix!

While supplies last, each bottle of Please Scream Inside Your Heart comes with a screamy, possum’y die-cut sticker!