Kritix &
Ripov
by Albert Russo
Waking up one morning with
a big bang and before he could exclaim "we've
been nuked,” Ripov caught himself spiraling
down like a bonzai tree into the vortex of his
disrupted dream.
At first, he attempted to
counter the centrifugal force, with the result
that he succeeded only in having his brain partly
squelched.
From then on he let his
intuition take over and consequently recovered
his wits, but not his balance.
Having little time or
occasion to reflect, he spent his dizzying
journey jotting down poemixes on the leaves that
clothed him. Somehow, the latter tore away and
got printed, not a simple feat, considering
gravity's implacable clutch.
Some of Ripov's loose
manuscripts landed on the desk of Moo Schnozle,
the guru editor of Bits 'n Pieces magazine.
Upon reading these leaves,
Schnozle blew up. His face turned dark green and
resembled that of the Monster of Loch Ness, with
carbuncles sprouting all over his forehead and
violet flames spewing out of his hairy nostrils.
As if this weren't enough, his backside began to
itch furiously: a half dozen piles - the stigma
of intellectuals - had suddenly reawakened.
A couple of weeks later,
Ripov got a note from Schnozle lui-même accusing
him of polluting the English language.
"Scribblers of your
ilk,' it went on, "ought to be burnt at the
stake. Those 'poemixes' of yours aren't even
funny - and who in his right mind would come up
with such a dumb name? The gall you have,
thinking you are perpetuating the tradition of
James Thurber! You must be the only one within
your radius to giggle reading such trash, unless
you happen to be a ventriloquist.
Don't bother to send me any
more of your twisted elucubrations. By the way, I've
heaped your dry leaves in front of my porch -
street sweeper business! For your information, I
had to strain my eyes over a looking glass. For
this alone, I should be charging you fifty
dollars.”
The street sweepers being
on strike that week, little Norma who lived
opposite Moo Schnozle found those reddish and
golden leaves very beautiful and she spent a
whole afternoon stitching them together and
designed herself a super skirt for her arts and
crafts class. She also made a laurel crown to fit
her dainty blonde head.
When the mistress saw
little Norma's work, she congratulated the lass
and gave her an A+ for precision and ingenuity.
Then, looking closer, she began to read the
poemixes that each one of those leaves contained.
"Do you know that
Ripov person?" she asked Norma who blushed
then nodded negatively - the little girl didn't
dare disclose how easy it had been to get her raw
material.
"This man is a genius."
the mistress exulted as if suddenly illuminated,
"such humor, such wit and philosophy
encompassed in a space so minute!"
Norma's mistress who
happened to be an active member of the Federal
Board of Education convinced her peers that Ripov's
poemixes become required reading in high school,
and thus the following year, they appeared in the
new edition of World Contemporary Literature.
When Moo Schnozle, the
editor of Bits 'n Pieces, saw that his own
children were learning Ripov's poemixes, he gave
up his magazine and turned to woodcutting.
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