"No One Writes to the Colonel" (1961) by Gabriel García Márquez

At 69 pages of 10-point font, "No One Writes to the Colonel" is one of the rarer outputs by Gabriel García Márquez that the casual reader can stomach in one sitting - just. If you read this short story retrospectively after finishing "One Hundred Years of Solitude" and "Love in the Time of Cholera", you will find a lot of common themes here, such as solitude, waiting over a long stretch of time, stubbornness, living under a totalitarian regime, living with dignity, and hope that borders on blind faith. In a sense, this is a less skeletal version of "Waiting for Godot". The fictional Colombian city of Macondo, its train, the banana industry, the Thousand Days' War and Colonel Aureliano Buendía are also mentioned in the work. Given its brevity, recurring themes and comparative simplicity in language, one is beguiled to consider it a prototype of sorts, but that kind of pigeonholing would be massively unfair to what is otherwise a great standalone work. It is remarkable how touching and, frankly, haunting the prose is when Márquez does not go overboard with magical realism and sarcasm. In fact, it is written almost entirely in realism. The story follows the lives of a retired colonel and his heavily asthmatic wife. The colonel religiously checks the post in anticipation for his military pension that has not arrived for fifteen years due to hierarchical corruption. The impoverished couple sells all their possessions for survival except for a clock, a picture and the rooster that they inherited from their son who was killed in political repression. The ordinary rooster, of unknown origin, condition and fate, practically drives the lives of that described society - it gives people (some) hope, (some) identity, (some) courage and, with luck, (some) money. The abrupt ending inevitably incites debates among optimists, pessimists and realists to decide whether blind faith and devotion are valuable assets under life-threatening circumstances. It is an unkind joke on the author's part, but what isn't black humour in this harsh world?