War. Yes I have an opinion on it, and no I won’t share it. I only bring it up because a friend of mine is out there, and I hope he comes home completely unharmed. He has to. He simply has to… because he and Laurie need to start a basketball team and because he’s far too good a writer to waste. It’s true. He wrote the following story, and I’m posting it with his permission so you can read the tale that inspired this artwork.

With no further ado, here is Rob Hanshaw’s “The Queen of the Darkling Elves…”

I met the Queen of the Darkling Elves at a party in Albuquerque, on Locust. I smiled. She smiled. I wondered, as we sometimes allow ourselves to do when first meeting someone, if our children would have her long, pointed ears that nearly reached to the back of her skull, or the curved, cultish blades she had for fingernails. I told her I was having a beer from the keg outside, and would she like one? She replied that her drink was mare’s blood. I asked for her phone number.

Our first date (along with all subsequent dates) was scheduled for midnight. I met her at an old, deserted crossroads just about in the middle of nowhere, its lanes heavy with encroaching trees and unknowns. She’d turned down dinner at a little Italian restaurant I knew of in favor of threatening lonely travellers until the sun came up. Her favorite thing to do was whisper unseen to passing, unlucky hitchhikers, slowly driving them mad to the point of racing through the brush and perhaps off a cliff or into a lake, her voice vague and unfathomable in their ears. Her other favorite thing to do was to link the road to the ethereal path to the darkling realms, so that drivers would eventually have to wonder why they never came to their destination, or why they hadn’t seen the sun in a few days, or why every change in direction only seemed to draw them deeper and deeper into a land where leaves glistened in the dark like glass; a land where small men raced next to the road, twisted daggers in hand, waiting to peel a traveller’s flesh and steal his goods. Her children were always hungry, the Queen said. I mentioned that she was very cute when she was totally immoral. She held my hand, caressed me with impossibly long fingers as we walked down one road or another like grade school sweethearts. I was in love.

Things started to get shaky right after we got married. Where would we live? I’d been looking for maybe a two-bedroom apartment downtown somewhere, or a condo. She insisted that I rule by her side from Peloponnesus (the center of the darkling realms), on a throne the color of night in mid-winter; a throne which, prior to our discussion, she’d had made and set in place beside, and a trifle below, her own. I began to suspect that she had control issues. We spoke, my pale-blushing bride and I, of other pressing matters:

“Children?”

“You will give me an heir and four daughters, one to wed each of the elementals.”

“Transportation?”

“For you a stallion, black as pitch. For myself, an onyx chariot pulled by six baying hounds. You will sell the Honda.”

“Pets?”

“Cats.”

Shit.

After a few years monotony began to set in. I’d spend a few hours every Saturday at a local pool hall and b.s. with my friend Bob from work. It was one Saturday that Bob had to stay home and nurse a hangover, and one Saturday that I had the eight-ball perfectly lined up for a side pocket (typical), that all the lights in the pool hall went out, room temperature dropped fifty degrees, and the air took on the biting scent of earth. “Great,” I thought. The voice of my bride, my queen, the heart of my heart resonated: “Tell me who is the she-wolf that has stolen you from me!!”

“What?”

Her voice was more shrill than usual. “You rendezvous here every 6th day, the day of Saturn. Do you deny it!!??”

“Oh, no sweetheart. I play pool here with Bob from work. You met Bob.”

The room went immediately back to normal. The proprietor threatened to ban me from his establishment if my wife kept coming in and messing with the electricity. I began to suspect that she had deep-seated insecurity issues.

That night she was aloof from me, reading her Necronomicon quietly to herself. My tickles found unfeeling flesh. My sweet nothings fell on long, deaf ears.

The next Monday I swung by Bob’s cubicle and found a darkling elf, all sharp nose and curled shoes, gnawing on a Bob-size femur. I called the divorce lawyer.

So take heed, young sir or madam. If ever you find yourself at a party on Locust, and the Queen of the Darkling Elves gives you that come-hither look, pass by, because she is one cast-iron bitch.

copyright © 2000 by Rob Hanshaw, posted with permission

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