This story was written for a story-writing competition, which it didn't win. It is the morning of the day before the wedding of a young girl in a country village in Russia in the mid-nineteenth century. (A 'verst' is half a mile, and YES, it CAN be done!)
The setting is Zimbabwe in the mid 1980s, when the whites are being pushed out by a new black ruling class and the land is still lawless, the police more lawless than the rest. A Shona tribe police chief in central Zimbabwe wants fourteen-year-old European boys. The Whitfelds, trying to hold onto their dairy outside Gweru, have a fourteen-year-old blond foster boy, one who already is tasting sex from black men and craves more. The Whitfelds's answer to being able to stay on is an obvious one.
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.
Nancy was a normal everyday office girl until he walked in to set up a new account at her bank. They started dating and getting to know each other when one day he told her what he was looking for... an old-fashioned girl!