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Description
OMG it feels so good to get back to writing and throwing around some ink and old dying markers!!!!

The Mana Farms story line frequently contains mature language, topics, and situations. The characters within are fictional beings with weaknesses and faults, and I cannot promise you that you will like them for what they believe, say and do.

Join the community of MANA readers! Start from the beginning. (New readers, it is strongly recommended you begin this series from the very first story...which can be found here: [link] ) Thanks!

PREVIOUSLY ON:

They called her obscenely beautiful, but the first time Brett North saw her stalk into the jock’s room with her bare brown shoulders and her long messy hair he thought the only remarkable thing about her was that she was in the jock’s room to begin with. That, and no one had kissed her yet. Day in and day out, the little brown girl went from dark tank tops and camouflage pants to shiny colourful jockey silks, like a Romanian orphan trying to hide her womanhood on the streets or some Viola all washed up on the edge of a beach. He quickly passed off the fascination surrounding her as the fascination afforded to any woman in a man’s world, a locker room of all things, where adrenaline and testosterone came off of their salty skin in fat drops large enough to fill syringes. To Santa, the locker room was a workplace, just as much her office as it was theirs, but to the others she was a prank or a sexual harassment case just waiting to happen. Obscenely beautiful, they said. Brett North had seen obscenely beautiful before. Santa was just taboo. And smart. And strong. And a challenge. Like any number of smart, strong, challenging women Brett had met on the ice with hockey sticks in their hands. That no one else could see this had amused him for the last eight months. They really ought to let more girls on the backs of racehorses. But as it was, today, she was the only one on the card, the only one in the room, and for the first time ever Brett was aware of how many of them, himself included, were staring at her.

Brett buttoned his brother’s black and navy blue silks for the Northern barn over his flak jacket, one eye fixed on Santa as she dressed in the corner, while Mario whispered to him and Freddy Sanchez what the latest rumours were. Brett sighed. Before Mario came with his version it was Joey and before Joey it was Tulio...each barn helpfully piling the gossip onto his plate like great wads of processed mashed potatoes in the cafeteria line. The pack of hyenas had been very talkative while the big shots were away, and it wasn’t helping that the Saint of Santa Anita had returned to her home track minus the Saint that had hung around her neck for as along as anyone around the backside could remember. Mario shook his head sadly, and leaned in a little closer to divulge the next thing he’d heard. She’d thrown it at the French Canadian during the King’s Bishop at Saratoga and where it had gone from there, no one knew. That was her image, her brand, and to make matters worse Santa had cut her hair.

Not that Brett or anyone else needed the little weasel Mario to tell them that. Brett couldn’t stop staring at her. Her long wild brown hair that had always been a windblown rats nest, tangled and liberated, was now cut at an artful angle from her chin to the back of her neck. She looked completely different now, a stranger in their midst. Modern and stylish and American.

“Do you think it’s some kind of political statement?” Mario ventured. “Like maybe she got some friend with cancer, or maybe she finally say ‘I play for the other team’?”

“Santa doesn’t play for the other team.”

Brett couldn’t explain it, but his ears went pink. They were burning a little. Somewhere in the last six months, Brett had lost the urge to torment her. Hell, he invited her home last weekend and there was no question he would have known what to do if she had gone along with it, but the drive to harass the taboo with tits was gone. Probably because somewhere along the way he’d decided she really did mean it when she said she loved that pasty white guy from Quebec. Until she didn’t and then bizarrely threw her necklace at him and lost it in the dirt of the straight. And cut her hair. And confused the hell out of him. Out of all of them. And maybe that was why his ears went pink.

Mario flicked them. “Yeah, you would know, huh?”

Brett knocked him away. Obscenely beautiful? Santa? No. She was a girl on the ice with a stick in her hands; beautiful in the way a shot of tequila looked appetizing with a worm in it and still got a man absolutely plastered....had them coming into the bar in thirsty, confused, sad droves saying, “I’ll have one of those.” Brett had no doubt she’d burn all the way down and have him regretting everything in the morning.

“Brett,” she said, the Saint had finished suiting up and had wandered closer to his locker. She leaned up against the door next to his. Her hands were at her throat, instinctively feeling for the lost necklace.

“Mrs. Claus.” He smirked at the glare she gave him and it took all of the will he had not to ask in which aisle she’d found the whole new her. Instead he grabbed his helmet, shut his locker door, and turned to her.

“Does the offer still stand?” she asked. Her voice came out blunt and aggressive and slightly drunk like a single mother reading a number off of a business card. Second doubts without wanting to sound like second doubts. Or desperation. Doubts and desperation always sounded the same.

Brett lost his grip on his whip. He grabbed it back up quickly. “What offer?”

“The offer. Your house?”

“My house?”

“You know, your house, me going to your place?”

Brett ran his hands through his hair, brushing his curls back and placing his helmet over them. His fingers struggled to locate the loose chin strap, then found it and snapped it into place. The locker room seemed much smaller and quieter. Mario had an eyebrow raised. Tulio was snickering on his way out the door. “My house? You mean my apartment? Yeah, sure. Offer still stands, after today’s card we can...”

“Roommates?”

Brett stared at her.

“Roommates,” she repeated, “Do you have roommates?”

“Well, yeah, Santa. Not everyone inherits a house. California is expensive.” Brett studied her. Took a quick and final swig of water and swished it around in his mouth. “I mean, what do you want to know?There’s Matt.” He glanced around him again at the others filing out of the room. A valet was tapping his watch. “And Wyatt. It’s just those two. It’s fine, right? We’ll just stick a sock on the door, a tie, you know, they’ll get it. Matt’s a prude but he went to college and Wyatt’s, well, Wyatt, so it’s not like he doesn’t know how it works.”

“A sock?” Santa stared at him blankly for a few awkward seconds before giving a small startled start. “Brett, I need a bed for awhile, I don’t necessarily need you in it.”

He felt a frown forming on his face. “Don’t you have your own house? Your inherited house?” He turned towards the door.

She followed him, her freshly shorn hair bouncing with every step. She smelled faintly, oddly, of cigarette smoke and burnt toast. “Yes, I do. Did. But I can’t stay there and I just need a place to crash. And since you offered...”

“I wasn’t offering my couch. I was offering my bed. And what’s wrong with it? Termites? Sinkholes?”

She kept in step with him as they left the jockeys’s room. The valets were rushing them, their arms sweeping in great big rounds toward the racetrack. “I realize it was your bed you were offering last weekend, but I figured you weren’t so chauvinistic as to expect sexual payment for something as sterile as a roof. You have a floor, Brett, it probably has carpet or a couch and I’ll even bring my own pillow and blankets.” Her voice changed as they got closer to the track. Lower. “And, yes, termites, my house has termites.”

Brett snorted. “Santa, just how long has it been since you lived with a man? With three? I wouldn’t sleep on a my floor unless I felt my life was missing a little hepatitis in it. And if it’s not my bed, it’s Wyatt’s or Matt’s. Wyatt hasn’t changed his sheets since the eighties and Matt works and will bitch about not getting sleep if you send him to the couch. And the whole place smells like chlorine, beer, sweaty balls.”

“You mean like the chlorine, beer, and sweaty balls of that last room,” she shot back. “Brett, I know men masturbate. I know they drink beer. I know they scratch their balls. If you don’t want me in your house, fine, but don’t pretend that I don’t know what you mean when you say chlorine. My whole life has been nothing but men. Disgusting, violent, filthy men. I just need a fucking roof and I’m not going to another hotel.”

Brett glanced at her as they approached the saddling ring. Her eyes were lost somewhere in a schizophrenic cloud of fire and rain. Like galloping through the mud on raceday...never sure of your footing, but going full speed anyway. He paused. It wasn’t a roof she wanted. Brett blinked at her. “Termites, Santa? Really?”

Santa paused alongside him and accepted a fan’s plea to pose for a photo. The young family waved Brett to join her, and he and Santa stood shoulder to shoulder and smiled for the tiny cellphone camera. “‘I can sleep on the couch, Brett,” Santa whispered to him, smiling as naturally as she could. She had changed the tone of her voice again, as if trying to erase the bitterness they’d both heard earlier. “I’m a big girl. I’m not scared of your little panties on the floor. I'm scared of termites. Don’t you boys have a vacuum?”

“We have a vacuum, Santa. We’re not that barbaric. And you don’t have to sleep on the couch, I’ll sleep on the couch. Just...give me a chance to pick up. And if you’re into peace offerings bring chocolate milk. Wyatt drinks it like water.”

“Good,” she replied, waving goodbye to the family, “I’ll meet you after the day’s card then.” She snapped her own helmet into place, jogged wordlessly to her horse and took a swift leg up.

Brett stared after her for a second or two, wondering if the last five minutes hadn’t been some mirage. That wasn’t Santa. Didn’t she have longer hair? Didn’t she speak more Spanish? He tilted his head and glanced at her again while wandering toward his own mount. She hadn’t said a single thing in her native tongue the entire conversation. She didn’t sound herself at all. No, that couldn’t have been Santa. There must have been some magic in that medallion of hers. She must have put her entire soul into Saint Christopher’s cold silver hands, and Laurence Leclerc, knee deep in the sand at Saratoga had dipped his long white fingers into the track and buried her. Buried the Saint of Santa Anita at the Graveyard of Champions. How fitting.

Brett wandered over to the Northern barn’s trainer. Lucky was beside his next horse, the bay colt Lapierre, muttering something in Slovak through a haze of cigarette smoke and cheap cologne. Brett took the reins and a leg up from him reflexively. He settled into the familiar folds of the saddle, his toes found each hard little stirrup. The colt moved a little underneath him. No, that couldn’t have been her. Santa definitely had longer hair. He gave the horse a nudge and then began weaving their way to the track. Lapierre, for his part, was equally entranced by the black bob of hair that went by them both in the warm up.

“Did that just happen?” Brett asked the colt, kicking him into pace behind her.

But Lapierre said nothing.

NEXT ON:

Description
OMG it feels so good to get back to writing and throwing around some ink and old dying markers!!!!

The Mana Farms story line frequently contains mature language, topics, and situations. The characters within are fictional beings with weaknesses and faults, and I cannot promise you that you will like them for what they believe, say and do.

Join the community of MANA readers! Start from the beginning. (New readers, it is strongly recommended you begin this series from the very first story...which can be found here: [link] ) Thanks!

PREVIOUSLY ON:

They called her obscenely beautiful, but the first time Brett North saw her stalk into the jock’s room with her bare brown shoulders and her long messy hair he thought the only remarkable thing about her was that she was in the jock’s room to begin with. That, and no one had kissed her yet. Day in and day out, the little brown girl went from dark tank tops and camouflage pants to shiny colourful jockey silks, like a Romanian orphan trying to hide her womanhood on the streets or some Viola all washed up on the edge of a beach. He quickly passed off the fascination surrounding her as the fascination afforded to any woman in a man’s world, a locker room of all things, where adrenaline and testosterone came off of their salty skin in fat drops large enough to fill syringes. To Santa, the locker room was a workplace, just as much her office as it was theirs, but to the others she was a prank or a sexual harassment case just waiting to happen. Obscenely beautiful, they said. Brett North had seen obscenely beautiful before. Santa was just taboo. And smart. And strong. And a challenge. Like any number of smart, strong, challenging women Brett had met on the ice with hockey sticks in their hands. That no one else could see this had amused him for the last eight months. They really ought to let more girls on the backs of racehorses. But as it was, today, she was the only one on the card, the only one in the room, and for the first time ever Brett was aware of how many of them, himself included, were staring at her.

Brett buttoned his brother’s black and navy blue silks for the Northern barn over his flak jacket, one eye fixed on Santa as she dressed in the corner, while Mario whispered to him and Freddy Sanchez what the latest rumours were. Brett sighed. Before Mario came with his version it was Joey and before Joey it was Tulio...each barn helpfully piling the gossip onto his plate like great wads of processed mashed potatoes in the cafeteria line. The pack of hyenas had been very talkative while the big shots were away, and it wasn’t helping that the Saint of Santa Anita had returned to her home track minus the Saint that had hung around her neck for as along as anyone around the backside could remember. Mario shook his head sadly, and leaned in a little closer to divulge the next thing he’d heard. She’d thrown it at the French Canadian during the King’s Bishop at Saratoga and where it had gone from there, no one knew. That was her image, her brand, and to make matters worse Santa had cut her hair.

Not that Brett or anyone else needed the little weasel Mario to tell them that. Brett couldn’t stop staring at her. Her long wild brown hair that had always been a windblown rats nest, tangled and liberated, was now cut at an artful angle from her chin to the back of her neck. She looked completely different now, a stranger in their midst. Modern and stylish and American.

“Do you think it’s some kind of political statement?” Mario ventured. “Like maybe she got some friend with cancer, or maybe she finally say ‘I play for the other team’?”

“Santa doesn’t play for the other team.”

Brett couldn’t explain it, but his ears went pink. They were burning a little. Somewhere in the last six months, Brett had lost the urge to torment her. Hell, he invited her home last weekend and there was no question he would have known what to do if she had gone along with it, but the drive to harass the taboo with tits was gone. Probably because somewhere along the way he’d decided she really did mean it when she said she loved that pasty white guy from Quebec. Until she didn’t and then bizarrely threw her necklace at him and lost it in the dirt of the straight. And cut her hair. And confused the hell out of him. Out of all of them. And maybe that was why his ears went pink.

Mario flicked them. “Yeah, you would know, huh?”

Brett knocked him away. Obscenely beautiful? Santa? No. She was a girl on the ice with a stick in her hands; beautiful in the way a shot of tequila looked appetizing with a worm in it and still got a man absolutely plastered....had them coming into the bar in thirsty, confused, sad droves saying, “I’ll have one of those.” Brett had no doubt she’d burn all the way down and have him regretting everything in the morning.

“Brett,” she said, the Saint had finished suiting up and had wandered closer to his locker. She leaned up against the door next to his. Her hands were at her throat, instinctively feeling for the lost necklace.

“Mrs. Claus.” He smirked at the glare she gave him and it took all of the will he had not to ask in which aisle she’d found the whole new her. Instead he grabbed his helmet, shut his locker door, and turned to her.

“Does the offer still stand?” she asked. Her voice came out blunt and aggressive and slightly drunk like a single mother reading a number off of a business card. Second doubts without wanting to sound like second doubts. Or desperation. Doubts and desperation always sounded the same.

Brett lost his grip on his whip. He grabbed it back up quickly. “What offer?”

“The offer. Your house?”

“My house?”

“You know, your house, me going to your place?”

Brett ran his hands through his hair, brushing his curls back and placing his helmet over them. His fingers struggled to locate the loose chin strap, then found it and snapped it into place. The locker room seemed much smaller and quieter. Mario had an eyebrow raised. Tulio was snickering on his way out the door. “My house? You mean my apartment? Yeah, sure. Offer still stands, after today’s card we can...”

“Roommates?”

Brett stared at her.

“Roommates,” she repeated, “Do you have roommates?”

“Well, yeah, Santa. Not everyone inherits a house. California is expensive.” Brett studied her. Took a quick and final swig of water and swished it around in his mouth. “I mean, what do you want to know?There’s Matt.” He glanced around him again at the others filing out of the room. A valet was tapping his watch. “And Wyatt. It’s just those two. It’s fine, right? We’ll just stick a sock on the door, a tie, you know, they’ll get it. Matt’s a prude but he went to college and Wyatt’s, well, Wyatt, so it’s not like he doesn’t know how it works.”

“A sock?” Santa stared at him blankly for a few awkward seconds before giving a small startled start. “Brett, I need a bed for awhile, I don’t necessarily need you in it.”

He felt a frown forming on his face. “Don’t you have your own house? Your inherited house?” He turned towards the door.

She followed him, her freshly shorn hair bouncing with every step. She smelled faintly, oddly, of cigarette smoke and burnt toast. “Yes, I do. Did. But I can’t stay there and I just need a place to crash. And since you offered...”

“I wasn’t offering my couch. I was offering my bed. And what’s wrong with it? Termites? Sinkholes?”

She kept in step with him as they left the jockeys’s room. The valets were rushing them, their arms sweeping in great big rounds toward the racetrack. “I realize it was your bed you were offering last weekend, but I figured you weren’t so chauvinistic as to expect sexual payment for something as sterile as a roof. You have a floor, Brett, it probably has carpet or a couch and I’ll even bring my own pillow and blankets.” Her voice changed as they got closer to the track. Lower. “And, yes, termites, my house has termites.”

Brett snorted. “Santa, just how long has it been since you lived with a man? With three? I wouldn’t sleep on a my floor unless I felt my life was missing a little hepatitis in it. And if it’s not my bed, it’s Wyatt’s or Matt’s. Wyatt hasn’t changed his sheets since the eighties and Matt works and will bitch about not getting sleep if you send him to the couch. And the whole place smells like chlorine, beer, sweaty balls.”

“You mean like the chlorine, beer, and sweaty balls of that last room,” she shot back. “Brett, I know men masturbate. I know they drink beer. I know they scratch their balls. If you don’t want me in your house, fine, but don’t pretend that I don’t know what you mean when you say chlorine. My whole life has been nothing but men. Disgusting, violent, filthy men. I just need a fucking roof and I’m not going to another hotel.”

Brett glanced at her as they approached the saddling ring. Her eyes were lost somewhere in a schizophrenic cloud of fire and rain. Like galloping through the mud on raceday...never sure of your footing, but going full speed anyway. He paused. It wasn’t a roof she wanted. Brett blinked at her. “Termites, Santa? Really?”

Santa paused alongside him and accepted a fan’s plea to pose for a photo. The young family waved Brett to join her, and he and Santa stood shoulder to shoulder and smiled for the tiny cellphone camera. “‘I can sleep on the couch, Brett,” Santa whispered to him, smiling as naturally as she could. She had changed the tone of her voice again, as if trying to erase the bitterness they’d both heard earlier. “I’m a big girl. I’m not scared of your little panties on the floor. I'm scared of termites. Don’t you boys have a vacuum?”

“We have a vacuum, Santa. We’re not that barbaric. And you don’t have to sleep on the couch, I’ll sleep on the couch. Just...give me a chance to pick up. And if you’re into peace offerings bring chocolate milk. Wyatt drinks it like water.”

“Good,” she replied, waving goodbye to the family, “I’ll meet you after the day’s card then.” She snapped her own helmet into place, jogged wordlessly to her horse and took a swift leg up.

Brett stared after her for a second or two, wondering if the last five minutes hadn’t been some mirage. That wasn’t Santa. Didn’t she have longer hair? Didn’t she speak more Spanish? He tilted his head and glanced at her again while wandering toward his own mount. She hadn’t said a single thing in her native tongue the entire conversation. She didn’t sound herself at all. No, that couldn’t have been Santa. There must have been some magic in that medallion of hers. She must have put her entire soul into Saint Christopher’s cold silver hands, and Laurence Leclerc, knee deep in the sand at Saratoga had dipped his long white fingers into the track and buried her. Buried the Saint of Santa Anita at the Graveyard of Champions. How fitting.

Brett wandered over to the Northern barn’s trainer. Lucky was beside his next horse, the bay colt Lapierre, muttering something in Slovak through a haze of cigarette smoke and cheap cologne. Brett took the reins and a leg up from him reflexively. He settled into the familiar folds of the saddle, his toes found each hard little stirrup. The colt moved a little underneath him. No, that couldn’t have been her. Santa definitely had longer hair. He gave the horse a nudge and then began weaving their way to the track. Lapierre, for his part, was equally entranced by the black bob of hair that went by them both in the warm up.

“Did that just happen?” Brett asked the colt, kicking him into pace behind her.

But Lapierre said nothing.

NEXT ON: