![](https://res.cloudinary.com/jerrick/image/upload/c_fill,f_jpg,fl_progressive,h_302,q_auto,w_1512/62161641d75fb6001ebc1b81.jpg)
Michael Darvall
Bio
Quietly getting on with life and hopefully writing something worth reading occasionally.
Stories (38/0)
What on earth are they doing? I’m blowed if I know, but they call it Rugby Union.
It’s so cold your fingers are stinging, you’d say it was pouring with rain except it’s coming in horizontally so you can barely see, you’re covered in mud, exhausted from an hour of intense physical and mental effort and you still have 20 minutes to go, and after all the rough impacts from the last hour, even your bruises have bruises. No, it’s not the entry course for the army special forces, it’s a game of rugby union and you love it, or you will once you’re back in the club-house with a beer/rum in hand.
By Michael Darvall2 years ago in Unbalanced
How I accidentally helped kids learn to get along
I am enraged by the self-serving, petty and spiteful opinions of those beneficiaries of privilege who belittle equity. It’s as if they fear that another person’s gain must correlate to their own loss. There must be a term to describe the utterly abhorrent evil they commit when, with false platitudes and twisted words, they would steal the very humanity from others, and in doing so, seek to exclude them from opportunity or even excommunicate them from society entirely. Because they’re “different”.
By Michael Darvall2 years ago in Cleats
Bearing the Soul
“Never harm Yonja,” he said, “He’s bearing all a’ the dead souls that need it.” I remember my grandfather’s dark eyes and tanned, wrinkled face, laughing crow’s feet at his eyes. He was talking about the barn owl we’d seen, my older brother and I, up in the scrub in the back paddock. It was roosting in an old mugga ironbark. Grey and rugged the tree was, fissured with age and riddled with nesting hollows; it must have been a sapling when Shakespeare’s Macbeth first strut and fret his hour.
By Michael Darvall2 years ago in Fiction
A Dilemma of Wives
It was eight years since Kabul fell to the Taliban. Back then his name was Alistair. He’d been in Afghanistan almost twenty years, working on construction projects. He’d thought about catching one of the evac planes back to Australia, but really, why bother? What was there back ‘home’ for him? Just a failed marriage and a daughter’s grave. Besides, Afghanistan had gotten under his skin; a hard country with hard people, but who found joy in small, transient pleasures.
By Michael Darvall3 years ago in Fiction
The Path of a Man
The annoying red light on the dash board wouldn’t stop blinking. Carser tapped it hopefully a couple of times, then banged the dash with his fist; Lex had said the ship was old and some of the wiring needed replacing. The red light kept flashing, now accompanied by an unpleasant whine.
By Michael Darvall3 years ago in Fiction
The Bitter Taste of Company
I met her in the little café hidden away down Serle’s Walk. She came in for a coffee and I was sitting there, at the table nearest the door, staring at the menu. I was going to order the apple pie, at least I thought I was, I mean it was a bit pricey maybe, but how could you go past it?
By Michael Darvall3 years ago in Fiction
Worth of a Man
Darkness. When Carser woke, it was into the darkness of a singularity; impenetrable, unyielding. Still silence bound his ears just as the darkness cloaked his eyes. He sat up, groping in the space around him, feeling for the familiarity of the solid world. His outstretched hand brushed a smooth wall to his right. Keeping one hand on the wall he clambered to his feet, only to hit his head on the ceiling.
By Michael Darvall3 years ago in Fiction
Fairy Tales of Truth
We live in a practical world. It’s very much geared towards the key pillars of the workplace; our lifestyle, our past-times, our education, they’re all very… vocational. The modern curriculum is heavily in favour of the STEM subjects – Science, Technology, Engineering, Maths. Other areas such as the Humanities, Arts, and Social Studies are often seen as fluffy, impractical subjects, Friday afternoon fillers in the classroom, even though they’re the keys to critical thinking. And critical thinking is the key to figuring out who we are as individuals, as people, as a society, and what sort of society we want.
By Michael Darvall3 years ago in Humans
Subscribe to my stories
Show your support and receive all my stories in your feed.
Send me a tip
Show your support with a small one-off tip.