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New fiction: The Secret of the Dark Elves

Belinda Rule September 14

As part of the MWF, Meanjin previewed some our best new fiction in the kitted out confines of a shipping crate by the Yarra. Belinda Rule gave a wonderful reading of her story, ‘The Secret of the Dark Elves’, which is published in our September issue. A brief extract is below, and you can now read the full story on our editions page.



In a minute, I was going to leave my room and go downstairs to the college lounge, and listen to Martin tell Cameron, Eddie and the other guy with the glasses about the secret of the Dark Elves in our Dungeons & Dragons game. I didn’t know what he was going to say yet, because he wouldn’t tell me when I asked him. It’s what they hadn’t understood about Dark Elves all along.

I just had to wait until next meeting, like everyone else. That was what he said, when I was walking backwards up the stairs in front of him and asking him about it. I kept getting in his way. The carpet on the stairs had jagged red swirls that could have been fire coming out of the mouth of a dragon.

As he looked up at me, his stigmatism gave a little wobble under his glasses. ‘I’m not going to tell you, so give up already,’ he said.

Then when we got to Floor 2, he half picked me up around the shoulders and shunted me out of the way. He was a Judo black belt and built like a tree trunk. His various theme t-shirts rode his middle like a whisky bottle stuck in a too-small paper bag.

‘What if I already know?’ I yelled after him.

‘I doubt it,’ he yelled back, the light glinting off his glasses as he went in his door.

That was two weeks ago. In a minute I was going downstairs finally to hear about the Dark Elves, but right now I was snapping my hair clip open and settling it properly on my head. Now I was popping a pore on my nose, and wiping my fingernail on a tissue.

My college room was an off-white box, no cornices. Or maybe it used to be white and it got dirty. It had chocolate-coloured floorboards. Stuff that I liked was stuck on the walls: a poster of the aphorisms of Yoda; the woodcut of the fourth day of creation from the Nuremberg Chronicle; a Tolkien calendar; a photo of my cat; a photo of my littlest brother when he was knee-high, in a blue tracksuit; and a Garfield cartoon.

Behind me in the mirror was a piece of the sky over north campus—little bits of clouds pootling past. Down in the carpark the dust in the gravel would be blowing whirligigs.

Now I was resettling my jeans around my hips and wiggling my feet in my runners. I was trying to look cute and nineteen, but not too cute and nineteen. Normally when I caught myself in a window I looked either dour and thirty-six, or dour and twelve. There was something about my face that was not quite right, as if it was too long. Sometimes I used the wings on the wing mirror to look at myself from different angles, to try to see what it was.

Now I was pulling up the doona and throwing it over the sheet, and closing my laptop, and kicking all the clothes on the floor into a pile, and making sure there was no underwear sticking out of anywhere. Because Martin might come up here afterwards, maybe to read the Yoda poster—he never had before but you never knew. In a minute now I would open my blue door (for Floor 3) and go downstairs past the yellow doors for Floor 2 and the red doors for Floor 1 into the lounge, and hear the secret about the Dark Elves.


 

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