Burning paper does not have the sweet smell of burnt wood. It has a bitter taste which repels. The day that this smell got stuck in my throat, I knew that the new world had arrived.

For years they had been saying that we were living an era of technological supremacy, that books were obsolete. Few museums remained where you could see paintings, and some objects, that had passed the strict selection controls. You could no longer get licences to make works of art in durable materials. The last manuscript had been destroyed years ago.

Due to lack of space, we had to hand in our obsolete objects so that they could destroy them. But the day the smoke suffocated us, I knew that there was no turning back. Books, when they burn, smell of blazing ideas. When I saw the words flying through the air, I knew that my generation had lost its home.

ORIGINAL TEXT (SPANISH)

(Flash fiction entered into fnac.es competition, 2008, word limit 150.)