J Erwine bought my first story for Martian Wave back in 2003, but before it appeared, I sold the story The Perfect Gold to Atsoise and that story appeared in February of 2004.
I use Google Alerts to notify me of things that I can blog about, and it told me that this story was available again. Either Google forgot about it or someone at the site has been reorganizing.
Anyway, the first story that I saw published on the nets is available again for you to read, if you like.
The illustration is something I mashed up from an old woodcut. I would have written the story differently now that I have a little more experience. There were several versions of this story written in the two or three years before this one. Changing the central character to a woman made the story work better than the earlier versions.