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Issue 28

September 2002 · 9 pieces

You Think YOU’RE Demoralized!

Fiction · Issue 28We had this big old Chinese elm tree by our patio taken out last year. Now a two hundred square foot area next to the patio is nothing but dirt, which my two ninety-mile-per-hour Australian shepherds are constantly tracking onto the patio. So my wife wants me to lay flagstones over the whole area to keep the patio clean. It will take about a ton of stone, which runs around twenty cents a pound, for a total cost of about four hundred dollars. I figure I'm getting off cheap; she could have insisted on extending the concrete patio slab, which would cost a couple of grand.