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!)
Diana is a prostitute in the temple of Aphrodite and sincerely believes in the value of her service to the goddess. But when her friend Andromeda adopts the new religion of Christianity, Diana's faith is also shaken.
Guido Sarto-Reutter is a fourteen-year old son of a Venetian-Austrian aristocratic family, that, in 1920, is both in poverty and riddled by scandal because both Guido's father and grandfather have, for years, been bedded by a Vienna baron in his castle. Guido is in a Venetian charity school for sons of families in straits like his run by a count who is pimping the boys. Guido has no trouble falling in with this demand, and the count has found a possible buyer for the boy.
Fourteen-year-old mulatto slave boy Sweet barely settles into the rice plantation, Riverside, up the Cooper River from Charleston, before his new master is dealing him to Charleston gambling house and male brothel owner Chance Drake to pay off a gambling debt.
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.