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Richard Calver

Author on Reedsy Prompts since Aug, 2023

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7 Stories

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Memories around my Father

Weekly Contest #347

My father was diagnosed with motor neurone disease or MND for short. Motor neurons carry messages from the brain to the muscles via the spinal cord and with MND these neurons become damaged and start to die. When this happens, muscles start to weaken and waste away and the usual path to death is two to three years, with no known cure for the disease. My father lasted just five months. There is, during the course of the disease, an inability to communicate and this aspect struck my father early. He was often the strong, silent type and then ...

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Oysters

Weekly Contest #318

In September last year, I started work as an accounts clerk for a large real estate agency in the city, one of the few jobs that suited my dyslexia. I prefer dealing with numbers and being able to concentrate on spreadsheets rather than myriad lines of confusing prose. There are two other people in accounting support roles, John, a small mouselike bloke, who seems incapable of making eye contact, and Jessica, Jess, a dark-haired bundle of energy. She is fanatical about running and every lunchtime she sets off for a run in nearby Hyde Park w...

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Rona

Weekly Contest #291

She had flame-red hair and worked as an electrician. It seemed strange that she should choose to work with electricity and currents but when you got to know her you realized that it was almost a self-parody. Sparks flew. She had a husband and three kids but her body was flat and hard and she didn't act like somebody's mother. She often suggested that a few of us should go to the pub after work and she never seemed uneasy about the time, never acted like she should be somewhere else. She was always laughing and smoking and chatting, telli...

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Moments of Light, Moments of Tears

Weekly Contest #269

We met at university. My lover’s eyes were grey/green, and she had a wild streak that attracted and frightened me in equal measure; her fine, long red hair was her pride and an emblem of her personality. After six months of dating, we moved in together. On the anniversary of our meeting, I gave her a pounamu that had belonged to my late mother. Nephrite jade, it had been formed by the artist into a single pikorua twist so that it resembled the intertwining fronds of a pikopiko, a New Zealand native fern symbolic of my mother’s birt...

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Secrets Before Motherhood

Weekly Contest #267

 Secrets Before Motherhood I parked the car in the narrow street, squeezed into a space that was only a short walk to our front door, feeling pride as I looked at the house we’d been renovating over the last twelve months, this Victorian wedding cake. We’d contrasted the rendered white walls with olive green window frames and sills and the front door had been newly painted in this lustrous hue. I turned the key first in the screen door lock, a protection against a break-in, then another key in the new lock fitted to the original but new...

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Girlfriend

Girlfriend She kissed me goodnight, enfolding the air with the smell of flowers and a tincture of alcohol. I later knew that dominant perfume to be gardenia: piquant, earthy and alluring, and the underlying smell the rasp of gin. I keep coming back to that moment, so intense, my mother at the house by the beach, this person with her blonde hair and smooth skin bending towards me with a goodnight kiss, a creature that my father had brought into our home. This is a moment that I capture in the heat of my quarantined life, clinging to that...

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Poodle

Weekly Contest #255

Poodle When Maurice retired, he walked and walked most days. Motion was everything. He could lose himself in the rhythm of his own footsteps, counting sometimes. He embraced the physical challenge of making himself part of not caring where he walked, so long as he was in motion, so he could feel only the physicality that these long walks engendered, the ache in the legs, the tightening of his stomach, the clean air in his lungs. He was nowhere on his walks, the place he retreated to no matter the geography. His walks often enc...

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