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     When you start your own business, you go into it thinking your time is your own and if you want to take some time off to go to the gym or run to the local pub for a little liquid workout, you just do it. But it never works that way. When you finish one case you always worry that there will never be another one. Then, how are you going to pay your bills, eat, drink, you name it. And then you’ll find yourself wandering  the streets begging for money.   

     That’s always been driving me, Anne Manx, to work all the time and never take time off. If they were keeping records of that sort of thing, I’d be the champion private eye of the entire universe. However, on this morning, I made up my mind to stop and smell the roses. And this time I was really going to do it. I was going to walk outside and take a deep breath in and then let out a loud “aah.” I walked outside into the clean spring air and took a deep breath only to start coughing violently because taking deep breaths was something I hardly ever did any more.   I still didn’t find a single rose to smell.         Aside from weeds, there wasn’t a lick of foliage anywhere to be found. Funny though –  you could smell it everywhere. Also, lots of garbage with rotting lettuce everywhere. And there was a whole lot of stench in a really small area, and it was coming from where some homeless people were living. They had set up the camp a few months  ago, and like everything, I never paid attention to it; I was working all the time.  Today, however, I noticed the smell emanating from it, and I can say for certain it was nothing like a rose. One of the homeless, a young – at least I thought she was young – woman approached me. She looked barely more than a girl. She was real skinny. Her skin was pale, and she was filthy and smelly.

       “Do you have any extra money?” she asked.

       “Not for you I don’t,” I told her. Then, I quickened my pace and left without looking back. So much for smelling roses. I wasn’t in the mood for talking. I was in the rose smelling frame of mind. When I got back home, I was in a decidedly foul mood. Not the stench kind of foul mood, just a bad feeling from a bad experience.

       I plopped my breakfast on the table and sat down to eat. One bite in, my damn communicator buzzed. I responded, my mouth full of bagel and cream cheese, “Yeth?”  

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"Anne Manx and the Gift of Gab"