Max Reduxbo
Created | Updated Apr 3, 2011
And so we say a fond farewell to Max Rebo in this final, thrilling adventure. So long, Max! We'll never forget you!
Max Reduxbo
Sometimes the innocent eyes of little children burn into you and make you feel raw with loss and bloated with a kind of bureaucratic guilt. It was like that with Max sometimes. I'll always forget his first birthday party. He was only ten then. I myself (and Irene – she was there too) was but only ten too. We were playing a party game: you had to face one another and make random words and sounds. So:
Max: Wan.
I: Tooth.
Irene: Reef.
Max: Orff.
I: I've.
Irene: Sax.
Max: Heaven.
I: Nate.
Irene: Nyn.
Max: N'den.
As you can see, Irene won. Max was crushed. We told him it was only a game and that nobody likes a poor loser, but he wouldn't hear of it. Irene tried to cheer him up with an orange crush, but he just turned to face the wall and so I drank his crush. Irene was devastated.
Earlier – perhaps even later than that – we played Blind Man's Donkey and Parcel Marceau. Max was trussed and sealed in the usual way while myself and Irene counted to half a million. When it was Max's turn to chide, something within him seemed to snap and he spent the next half a million seconds rapidly rotating, sweeping all the mantle off the mantle-piece, bisecting the curtains and tearing up the pictures with his fat whizzing trunk. Myself was crushed. Irene fell into a glass of orange and drowned.
When the media arrived later, I was nearly squashed in the crush. Max read out a poem by way of apology:
Everyone wanted a piece of Max.