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MANA: Never

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Let's just call this: OMG HOCKEY IS OVER. Just a quick little something. REALLY rusty, I know, but bear with me.

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:



The television set in the living room was on. It was early September in Los Angeles, the season of wildfire, and reds and blacks were flickering on the screen. From the corner of her eye, she saw white houses with red roofs, trees swaying in the high winds crackling like burnt strips of bacon, and smoke crawling into the sky above the mountains and blanketing them in ash. The air was full of smoke again, and he was lying there, sedated by it, puffing it up into the air below her ceiling where it somersaulted over his head like the ghost of a russian acrobat. He smiled at her.

“Dulce, you came home.”

“It’s my home.”

“Relax, relax, relax, relax. I’m already on the couch.”

Rocco had always had a way of rolling his “r”s so that everything came out like a throaty woof. It made her uneasy, the way it would have made anyone uneasy if the same sound had come out of a very large cat. She glanced around her house. Well, he hadn’t touched much since she first found him here. Last night he’d blown on Max’s trombone, thumbed lazily through his books, used the toaster, then pissed and missed the toilet. Santa checked the photos on the walls for fingerprints, but he hadn’t touched them again.

“Say something charming to me,” he murmured to her. He said it with a slight grin, the golden tooth flashing in the dim yellow light of the living room, so that she knew he wasn’t completely lost in the happy haze of marijuana and television. He waved at the reporters on tv, “This American news...crisis after crisis.”

She tossed her keys onto the table by the door. “Fires again?”



“Big Sur. It’s all very tragic they keep saying, it’s supposed to be beautiful.”

“Big Sur is beautiful.”

“Was,” Rocco reminded her.

For a moment Santa remembered to be surprised to see him. Not only because it was Rocco and she hadn’t seen him in six years and now here he was on her couch smoking pot. On the drive home, she figured she’d find him in her bed, rubbing his rough body all over her sheets like some wild buffalo pissing in the dust and then rolling his great big shaggy hump in it. After all the years he must have spent sleeping in between scratchy sheets at the Super 8s and the hard springy couches in some trailer park, she thought he’d want to bleed her dry of the butter and fat of America. Instead he sat there, legs spread wide, an open beer leaving a wet ring on her wooden coffee table, watching the mansions of the rich white American males burn.

He lifted his paper to his lips and took a breath. “You just here to get your things?”

“Pretty much.”

He grunted at that. “I still believe, Maria,” he began, grey smoke slithering out of his nose and between his teeth, “things would have been fine for us if you hadn’t been fucking around with those pills. Given me a chance to work things out, to be the man I was supposed to be.”

“You never gave me a choice, Rocco.”

Rocco snorted. “You say that as if there is a choice. As if God in heaven gives you one. I said chance, not choice. Did you ever once approach me, talk to me about it? No. You just go to some doctor and start taking pills. Birth control pills, crazy pills, pills to make you skinny.”

She pushed against his shoulder so that he moved a few inches and then she sat down on the couch beside him. His thighs were warm. She knew somewhere in the closet was a suitcase and that she should be packing it, and packing it as quickly as she could and driving to Brett’s with her foot pressed hard against the gas, but Rocco was here and somehow without her even thinking about it they were thigh to thigh again. On the television, a large white airplane flew low and a heavy load of red sand sprayed out from behind it over the flames. They watched it quietly for several long seconds.

“You were high, Rocco, always always high,” she finally replied.

“And you weren’t?” Rocco laughed, “Don’t play the angel with me, Dulce. You smoked and robbed and drank and walked like there was a saddle between your legs before I even put one there. The only difference between us was that you had a book in your hand where I had a gun.”

“You thought it was charming.”

“Si, when the books were required reading for good little school girls in white smocks and black shoes...Jorge Isaac, and Rodo and Borges and even Gallegos.”

Santa sighed and stared at the television. They both did. The news cut between the houses of northern cities, the gateway to Big Sur, and the lonely protected zones covered in a blanket of red and black. Santa remembered Gallegos and the feel of those well worn dog-eared pages between her fingers. The conflict between civilization and barbarism dueling on every sheet, tempting her with the choice. She still recalled the day when she realized that Dona Barbara wasn’t really a woman. She glanced at him again, sitting next to her, that warm thigh up against hers and her unease returned like an ice cube melting down her throat.


The last time she had held Gallegos’ classic in her hands was after Rocco had thrown it at her, all of her books, in a great big suffocating pile as he pulled the shelf off of its screws from the wall...the day he realized she was using birth control because she would never love him. Then there was Eddie Ne lying with her on the couch, lamenting that they had crossed beyond what could have been, into what would never be. Leclerc drawing the flag of Quebec on her thigh that morning in Montreal and Santa not even finding it odd. The little french conquistador penning his nationalism onto her skin as if she were some territory and she had giggled at him for it and then...he’d pulled down her jeans in a frantic rush and in the sweat and salt of the moment his fingers had raked across the ink and smeared it and Santa had panicked. And Max, Maxwell slipping into a coma in his final hours alive and saying goodbye to the little jockey who had never changed her name for him.

Rocco ran his hands through his hair as if he could sense her muscles tightening, reading her mind. “You were never going to marry him were you?” He turned and looked darkly at her.

He didn’t have to point at Max’s belongings, to the books, or the trombone, or the quiet urn staring at them both from atop the fireplace. Santa felt faint, the way she did in the the starting gate; sick and faint and ready to leave.

“This Laurence?”

“What?”

“The frenchman. You were never going to marry him,” Rocco snorted, looking absurdly pleased with himself.

“No,” she whispered and realized it was true.

Rocco followed her milky look to the urn on the fireplace, then sighed and snuffed out his weed. “But you did marry me.”

Santa abruptly stood and walked out of her living room.

“Where are you going?”

“To my room.”

“I wasn’t done talking with you,” he shouted at her from her couch. He took a large mouthful of beer from the bottle, swallowed hard. “Miss Valencia from Cali. Coming up to Cartagena from your fancy private schools and think you can have a little fun with the boys from Boca Grande? What did you tell me that day we met? You were reading that book and we were teasing you and you said that Gallegos called her Barbara, Dona Barbara, because he was playing with the word barbarism. We were all a bunch of barbarians. Barbarians...and you wished you were us.”

Santa turned into Max’s old bedroom and went straight to the closet doors. She flung them open loud enough that Rocco slammed his corona hard against the wood of the coffee table in front of the tv in reply.

“Hey!” he shouted from the living room. “Hey!”

She grabbed one of Maxwell’s old suitcases. She’d buried her dog, Habs, in the last suitcase she owned and still hadn’t replaced either of them. This one was blue and torn and collared with old claim tags. When she unzipped it, the smell of Max’s shirts blew up into her face. She had to hold her breath to keep herself from retching. Rocco came into the room and leaned unsteadily against the doorframe.

“Where are you going?” he repeated, rubbing at his eyes.

She began pulling Max’s old clothes out of the suitcase and leaving them in a pile on the bed. Maxwell had always been good at packing, but never unpacking. They were yellow and rank and wrinkled beyond repair. “Why would I tell you?”

He stepped a few more feet into the room. “I’m your husband. You can tell me where the fuck you are going.”

She escaped to her dresser on the other side of the room, putting the entire bed between them. “Brett’s.” She glanced at his bloodshot eyes from the across of the mattress. “No one you know.”

“You think I don’t know Brett North?” Rocco forced a smile. He meandered across the room towards the bed, edging closer to her, running his fingers over her collection of roosters on her nightstand, eyeballing the pile of yellowing dress shirts on the bed. “Which one of these cocks is his?”

“The cocks. Oh my god, the cocks. That was always what it was. Your cock. Your cock and how much I was insulting it.” Santa pulled open a drawer and grabbed at the clothing inside. Her fingers closed down on what might have been a bra. She threw it quickly into the suitcase without looking.

“My cock?! My cock?!,” he suddenly shouted, fingers curling around the raised tail of one of her roosters, “Bullshit. It was always about yours.”

Santa shook her head in disbelief. “You’re high. And drunk.”

“Oh si, Dulce, that’s me, your high husband, your pathetic excuse of a spouse. You always thinking you could be a better man than me. Read better books. Ride better horses. Make better money. You didn’t want me inside you, you wanted to peel it off of me and wear it like a passport.”

Santa snorted and tossed a roll of socks into the pale blue suitcase. “I didn’t want your penis. I wanted my very own penis. How freudian of you.”

Rocco picked up the rooster by the tail and slammed it down hard against the nightstand, it shattered and the lamp beside the bed tumbled to the floor. He was moving quickly around the bed between them now when Santa’s fingers found what they were looking for in the drawer, underneath balls of socks and wads of underwear, cold and hard and familiar. She withdrew the black handgun from the dresser and pointed it squarely at his chest. He stopped in his tracks, stared at the gun and smiled.

He laughter, high and throaty, erupted into the bedroom. “And now here is my Maria Zarate who I have not seen in six long years. My wife. My greatest pupil. Yes, I remember you now. Wasn’t I the one who taught you to shoot?”

“Would you care to see if I still remember?”

Rocco raised his hands and took a few steps back, smiling at her. “No, Maria, my house is yours, my doors always open. Please don’t let me get in your way.”

She grabbed the suitcase off of the bed with her other hand and glared at him. “I never have.”


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TheTellerofStories's avatar
:iconexcitedplz::iconexplodeplz:

These icons don't do justice to the muted squeal I was forced to use to avoid waking those that are sleeping right now in my household. Just know that I am extremely delighted to see MANA and that I very nearly let out the most girly squeal I've ever done.

Did I ever mention how excited I get whenever you mention the trombone, given that I am a trombonist myself? :giggle:

Anyway, I'm in awe as ever by your storyline and how much of Santa's past is being revealed, showing a different side to her personality. She's not just tough Santa who can kick someone's ass at the track, but she's facing up to Rocco, the man she's run away from. I'm waiting anxiously for the next piece but you make sure to get out and enjoy life now and then, Penny!