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

If the narrator has lived a life as best as she could – wildly unconventional, but one that has given her joy in many ways – hasn’t she triumphed over cruelty after all, over having everything stripped from her, her dignity and essential humanity winning in the end?

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.

‘Yesterday, between the time when the lights came full on and when the young guard arrived, in other words when they changed shift, my heart produced three thousand, two hundred and twenty beats, and today, five thousand and twelve. How long is that?’ I saw her gasp. ‘What? Did you count them?’ ‘It could help measure time.’

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.

If the only thing that differentiates us from animals is the fact that we hide to defecate, then being human rests on very little, I thought.

You have no more idea than I or any of the rest of us do.’ ‘True, but I’ll know what you think, you’ll know what I think, and perhaps that will spark off a new idea, and then we’ll feel as if we’re behaving like human beings rather than robots.’

but I am reduced to calling a memory the sense of existing in the same place, with the same people and doing the same things

That evening, the questions began to rear their heads again: where were we? What were we going to do? Was this Earth?

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