What a terrific story! I enjoyed it wholeheartedly, and there were so many turns of phrase that caught and held me... just one of them was how the ending paragraph echoed the beginning.

Just a note - I wonder if anyone else has the same problem with your page design obscuring the first and last characters of each line? I had to use a ?style=mine in order to read it properly. Sadly, I don't have my own style set up correctly and it's all tiny, so it was squinty-time. Worth it, though. Definitely worth it.