The reading sample

I haven't spoken in a long time, and I'm only now noticing that you forget how.

Not the words. They're all there; if anything, they lie too close together. What you forget is the order. That you start at the front, then keep going, and bring someone along who doesn't yet know what you have known for a long time. I've practiced it here, often, with no one, and every time it fell apart in the middle. Once I told it back to front for three days and didn't notice.

Now, for the first time, someone is sitting there. So interrupt me if I jump.

My name is Sabir. I'm saying it because no one has said it in a very long time, not even me, and because I want to know whether it's still true.

I was 25 on the morning I'm going to tell you about. Before that I kept the air clean in apartment towers and shops, filters and shafts, and I was good at it. That's all there is of the rest of me, and I only say it so it's clear that there was something before.

Apart from me, there is no one left who saw the world before. There were 104 of us, and I'm what's left. The others were found over the years, one after another, and at some point I stopped keeping count of the names, because the counting made me restless and because a wrong number is worse than none.