Farming Stories

Life was tough in the scratch-earth mountain valleys of the Colorado Rockies in the years following the Civil War. They were unbearable when the father of a small family had died—and even more so when the wife is Lakota and the son a half-breed. But the fourteen-year-old son, Cigala—Little One—is beautiful and sexually desirable to men. Where there is such an opportunity, there is always a way.

What would make a sophisticated, well-educated American man in his early thirties take a job running coffee and cinnamon plantations in rural East Timor for a Portuguese export house? It couldn't be because the age of consent for teenage boys there is fourteen, could it?

A brother and sister were caught in a storm on the mountain.

Sometimes one bad decision ruins a person's whole life.

Rajeev lives in Gujarat with his mother and lovely sister Nehal. One fine day Nehal becomes unruly and bratty and his mother must discipline her on their rural farm. This story is told from the perspective of someone who is not a native English Speaker.

Trying to forget and to deny his Revolutionary War coupling with the fourteen-year-old soldier Andrew, newly minted and married lawyer, Ben Smithson, resettles at the Virginia frontier in 1790 to start a new, clean-slate, life as the community's lawyer. When his wife dies, however, he becomes ensnared in the desire for two fourteen-year-old boys, the gypsy boy Liam and the miller's son, Tad, an interest that is reciprocated and enflamed.