Faith Thurnwald
Stories (2)
Filter by community
The Long Swim
He called me a week before it happened. It was one of those awkward unavoidable calls you only ever have with family. It was a nice day, I was sitting outside my flat, I probably smoked a cigarette after the call; to alleviate some stress. It wasn’t a stressful time in my life so much as it was a strange one. The liminal space between happy and sad that comes with freedom and loss. My flat was cute, a slightly overpriced townhouse. It was near the beach, and I had a neighbor who hated that I was younger and not saddled up with a baby. Anyway, I didn’t know he was going to kill himself.
By Faith Thurnwald5 years ago in Fiction
The Commune
I wake up to the smell of sweat and shit; my faithful alarm clock. You have to be in a deep sleep to block out the noises and the smells of the commune. By the time morning rolls around I never am and so I wake up to the aromas. I get up, I dress, I rinse my face. The bowl of water I use to clean myself is getting brown with dirt; I’ll have to refill it soon. I don’t like going to the edge of camp though and it’s something I try to avoid. A few days without washing won’t kill me. It must be an old ritual of how life was before, wired in me from a time I can’t even remember. Most of the other residents of the commune don’t wash so much, but I refuse to look like a dog in the mud. Maybe it’s my way of scraping together the little dignity I have. I keep my black hair cut short for convenience, and I try to keep a little clean. I don’t keep anything that’s a reminder of life before, probably because I can’t remember shit, and I find that sentimentality hypocritical. We’ve created a terrible life for ourselves all because we wanted to be liberated; we wanted to change the world, change the unequal distribution of wealth. Yet here we are poorer than ever, clinging to the little useless possessions we have, sounds like bullshit to me. That’s only the older generations of us though; they’re the ones that know what happened, the rest of us are in the dark, just like me. I don’t even know my own name.
By Faith Thurnwald5 years ago in Fiction
