Michael Brown's Page

In the bakery Señor Wemple is making the cookies for the children’s posada because the Christmas season is when he comes alive. The incessant caroling, however, has him a little on edge; it’s not that he doesn’t like Christmas carols, but there are only five of them and they play continuously while the people are away.
The florist, Madame Treyne, has made her most beautiful arrangements and is now sitting back to admire them, and this year a family will stand in front of her window appare… Continue

When we were in the ninth grade we had an English teacher named Miss Averbach; do you remember how she told us in March that she had heard a new rock group called The Doors that she predicted would have a number one hit on the radio by the semester's end, and damn if we were not all listening to Light My Fire during the last week of classes? I think she was from Pennsylvania, and her favorite expression seemed to be “Quat everyone.” We were always making noises, some ruder than others; th… Continue

If you don't want to play the game adhering to the rules, you can't expect to reap the rewards that usually come to winners. People admire iconoclasts as long as they have shown adaptation before veering off into uncharted territory. No amount of explication earns credibility when creativity is displayed fully blown on unproven ground. If Picasso had not begun his career drawing anatomically correct women, it is doubtful viewers would understand what he was saying with Les Demoiselles d'Avign… Continue

The coyote was only a kid, nineteen years old and inexperienced, and when the group ran out of water on the Devil’s Highway, he left twenty-six people behind and headed up north. Mostly workers from coffee plantations, they were seeking some measure of security for families waiting behind with nothing. Just over half of the group died trudging north after their lost guide under the scorching sun.
When the authorities located remains, some of them, inured to the sight of desiccated border… Continue