AustLit

'In the course of one life lived beyond belief although couched in the ordinary there once existed a gentleman named Ernid Ernst. Possessing an extraordinary name he looked for extraordinary work but after emigrating with his humorless parents from Prague forty years or so ago all he could find as a job was a common shift-working engagement in Sydney at Burp Lemonade Works who were determined to conquer Coke as the universe’s preferred fizzy drink.

'He commenced operations as a lowly vat watcher where his duties consisted mainly of observing it fizz.

'He rose rapidly through the ranks and made it to the esteemed position of Logo. Without his really knowing he became the very drink he manufactured and his new life was hedonistic and ravishing and his fame bought him a wild ride he was incapable of paying for without a soul he could call his own.

'He also became delusional after falling from lofty heights into the very vats he inspected with a great eye for chemical variations. His tumbling down into a particularly large lemonade vat sent him insane in next to no time and thenceforward he thought he was really someone else entirely such as Lee Harvey Oswald the lone assassin of President John Kennedy, and he thus endeavored to simultaneously promote his company’s famous drink and put up with the added psychological pressure of believing he slew JFK in 1963.

'The entire area surrounding his silent and humble parent’s home was razed to the ground by sniggering local councils and by virtue of a government decree the new way to live in Sydney was in a hole.

'The living in a hole wasn’t as horrid as it might seem but there was simply not a single thing anyone could possibly do about it.

'The Mouthless Murderer is fantasy and real simultaneously exactly as it is in Australia as we go to press. We are dying of leadership and the poor suffer in ways tragic and unfunny unless you have the heart to laugh out loud at them, as the rich find easy.