Short story fever!

I've never really been into writing short stories, always thinking in terms of novel-length ideas, but lately I've been toying with a few of them. I have one that's half finished that I intended to work on today, but this morning I woke up with a new idea (dream inspiration again!) and had to start right away. I just got a new PDA/mobile phone combo that runs Word Mobile, so at about 7:30am I was lying in bed, writing the opening paragraphs with a stylus. I continued it throughout the day and have just finished. After a couple more read-throughs and edits I'm going to post it here and also email it to Elektra's Crapometer for critique.

My last short story, Me and the Devil Blues, got some really positive responses and useful critique over there, which was really heartening. This story is much darker, and very specific to where I live, so I'm not sure how it'll go down.

Incidentally, I used some HTML/CSS trickery to achieve the more readable layout seen in my last short story. If anyone wants the code for doing that, let me know in the comments.