Chronicle of a Death Foretold

by Gabriel García Márquez

My sister the nun, who wasn’t going to wait for the bishop because she had an eighty-proof hangover, couldn’t get him to wake up.

The cocks of dawn would catch us trying to give order to the chain of many chance events that had made absurdity possible, and it was obvious that we weren’t doing it from an urge to clear up mysteries but because none of us could go on living without an exact knowledge of the place and the mission assigned to us by fate.