The Digested Twenty-first Century Read Free Page B

pregnant I had to leave rather than love I wrote to my son everyday but never sent the letters I came back! to New York when I discovered he had died and went to live with your grandma again but you only know me as the Renter what is the sum of my life 466389028364859690707 464532537
    The key belongs to someone else. It has no catharsis; in its place there is only sentimentality. My mum loves me after all. My grandpa and I dig up my dad’s empty coffin and we place his letters inside. I rewind the pictures of 9/11 and my dad returns to me.
    Digested read, digested: Extremely annoying and incredibly pretentious.
Memories of My Melancholy Whores

by Gabriel García Márquez (2005)
    The year I turned 90, I wanted to give myself the gift of wild love with an adolescent virgin. I thought of Rosa Cabarcas, the brothel owner.
    ‘You ask the impossible, my mad scholar,’ she said. But I implored her and she promised to ring back within the hour.
    I’m ugly, shy and anachronistic, and I live alone in the house where my parents lived, scraping by on a meagre pension from my mediocre career as a journalist. And I have never been to bed with a woman without paying. In short, I am without merit or brilliance.
    On the morning of my 90th birthday, I awoke, as always, at five in the morning. My only obligation was to write my signed column for Sunday’s paper, for which, as usual, I would not be paid. I had my usual aches and pains – my asshole burned – but my heart lifted when Rosa rang to say I was in luck.
    I gazed at the phosphorescent sweat on the naked body of the 14-year-old virgin asleep on the bed, and admired the brilliance of my language. ‘She was nervous,’ Rosa informed me, ‘so I gave her some Valerian.’
    She did not stir. ‘Let me call you Delgadina,’ I whispered, for like most solipsists I preferred to invent my own names. I may have slept myself and a tiger may have written on the bathroom mirror – we magical realists can never be too sure of anything – and when I left her snoring in the morning she was still as pure as the night before.
    ‘You fool,’ spat Rosa. ‘She will be insulted you did not care enough about her to abuse her.’ But I did not care: I had detected the fragrance of Delgadina’s soul and had realised that sex was the consolation we receive for the absence of love.
    I had planned to tender my resignation at the paper, but I was so moved at being given a voucher to adopt a stray cat that shat and pissed at will, that I resolved to continue.
    And my fame grew. Every evening I would go to Rosa’s house and spend the night admiring the sleeping Delgadina – whose body was filling out agreeably – while reading out loud the great works of literature; and by day people would read out loud the tacky sentimentality of my columns.
    Late into the year, Rosa interrupted my reveries. ‘A client has been murdered,’ she shouted. ‘Help me move him.’
    I returned night after night, but Rosa’s house was locked up. I pined for Delgadina. I sensed my cat might lead me to her, but like my own writing, he led me up a cul-de-sac.
    At last, Rosa returned. ‘Whore,’ I said. ‘You have sold Delgadina to secure your freedom.’
    ‘How wrong you are,’ she cried. ‘Others may consider you a sordid, delusional old man, but Delgadina loves you. She kept her distance because she wanted to save herself for you.’
    My heart soared. I was not a perv. I was a 91-year-old man with so much love to give and so much life to live. I will survive.
    Digested read, digested: 100 pages of turpitude.
The Possibility of an Island

by Michel Houellebecq (2005)
    Daniel 1,1: I get so tired writing comic sketches about gays, blacks, Jews and Muslims these days. But being thought to be avant garde has its advantages; people take you seriously and pay you shed loads of cash for any old tosh. And you get lots of pussy, too.
    Daniel 24,1: Look at those savages in the distance. They are humans. I sit alone in my