The Giant Mouth

James Anaglypta Brady had a giant mouth: there was no getting away from it. Even at ‘People Who Have a Giant Mouth’ conventions people would point to him and say “Who’s that man with the giant mouth?”

It was bigger and wider than the entrance to the Mersey Tunnel. Fully extended, say when he screamed in the night when the 2000 mile long lugworms came after him, Professor Stephen Hawking may well classify it as ‘a black hole’. That’s how big it was. Although, strangely, he did not possess giant teeth: just millions and millions of small ones, like some sort of herbivorous shark. His dentist made a fortune from him.

Of course, you couldn’t really kiss him. You’d be too frightened of falling into the gaping chasm never to be seen again. Luckily, therefore, it was unlikely that he’d reproduce.

A giant, gigantic mouth on a normal sized head: how had this come about? It wasn’t a family trait: all his pre-descendants, as far as it could be known, had perfectly normal sized mouths. There was no atavism at work in the genes. He would have noticed, as would everyone else, if a grandparent or an aunt had a super-gigantic mouth. He would have asked his mum or dad “Why has Auntie so-and-so got a frighteningly, really quite awesomely, large mouth?”

Only he, in the family, had this awe-inspiring facial feature, the benefits of which were quite clear. TV appearances on ‘Whose Got a Weird Body Part?’ were really very lucrative, and in winter he rented his mouth out as a ski-slope and pot-holing was also a possibility.

There was that famous evening that he’d gone to sleep with his mouth open and awoke to find an entire marina of yachts and light aircraft in there along with a newly built holiday resort called El Flamenco where Joe Longthorne was performing ‘Hits From the Shows’.

A good pointer in life, he said afterwards to an eminent psychiatrist, is never to wake up to Joe Longthorne singing in your mouth.

James Anaglypta Brady died at the age of just 37. He had taken his own life by filling his mouth with 350, 000 tonnes of curried chickpeas. When he swallowed his stomach exploded and the entire town of Rochdale was stuccoed with the fibrous material. 

Today his giant mouth forms the galaxy Anaglypta 2 where Joe Longthorne is never even allowed to visit let alone sing.