I Who Have Never Known Men: Discover the haunting, heart-breaking post-apocalyptic tale

But if that person comes, they will read them and I will have a time in their mind. They will have my thoughts in them. The reader and I thus mingled will constitute something living,

Every thirty days, I say to myself that a month has gone by, but those are mere words, they don’t really give me time. Perhaps you never have time when you are alone? You only acquire it by watching it go by in others, and since all the women have died, it only affects the scrawny plants growing between the stones and producing, occasionally, just

Perhaps, at this very moment, as I end my days exhausted, a human being is walking across the plain as I did, going from bunker to bunker, a rucksack on their back, determinedly seeking an answer to the thousands of questions consuming them.

I have understood nothing about the world in which I live. I have criss-crossed it in every direction but I haven’t discovered its boundaries.

I acquired a perfectly useless knowledge, but I enjoyed it. I felt as if I had embellished my mind and that made me think of jewels, those objects which women used to adorn their beauty, in the days when beauty had a purpose.

I was perfectly aware that I had only added another question to all the others, but it was a new one, and, in the absurd world in which I lived, and still live, that was happiness.

I felt a surge of grief, I, who had never known men, as I stood in front of this man who had wanted to overcome fear and despair to enter eternity upright and furious.

Like that, on her feet, without being ill? It wasn’t her body that was giving up, but her spirit, which had grown increasingly weary of animating those muscles, of making that heart beat, of going through all the motions of living, the spirit that nothing had nourished for such a long time, that had watched its sisters die and that had for its only

‘We’re not very resourceful, are we!’ said Greta ruefully. ‘We come from a world where it wasn’t necessary, everything was ready-made and we never asked how things were produced,’ replied Frances.