Breakfast was like any other, two eggs over easy, two strips of bacon, a slice of toast and a glass of OJ. Ashley sat at her table and read the newspaper as she nibbled on a piece of toast, reading a fascinating story on the front page about a man who broke into the zoo two nights before and sodomized some penguins in the Antarctica exhibit. She giggled to herself with the thought of the night caretaker walking in on such a spectacle.
After breakfast, Ashley went upstairs to brush her teeth. When she had rinsed her mouth, she looked deep into the mirror to admire herself. She wasn’t at all unattractive. Her face was somewhat rounded, and soft from lack of age, and a few strands of her chin length brown hair dangling in front of her blue green eyes that seemed to sparkle in the dark but fade in the light. She suspected she had irish blood in her somewhere along the line, but who really knows, now-adays?
Still looking in her mirror, Ashley brought her right hand up to her chest and, slowly, she slipped her hand down, over her white t-shirt, to her left breast. She briefly tweaked the nipple and moved her hand downwards, bringing her left hand up to her right breast. Just before her right hand penetrated her waistline, the numbers on her watch seemed to catch her eye and she realized that she had to go to work. As she reluctantly stepped out of the door, she looked back for one last glance at herself in the mirror hanging on the opposite wall, and in doing so hit her shoulder against the door jamb, causing her to trip herself, and she spun around to fall on her face.
After she collected herself, she went down the stairs and outside to her forrest green Toyota Paseo. She opened the door and sat inside with the door open, looking back at her house. So many memories, her fourth birthday party, all her friends from over the years, so many holidays, so many school projects. One came to her mind right now. It was a project on Hinduism and it’s influence on modern American society and culture that she did in the seventh grade. She was working on the visual along with her friend, Tommy. That was the day she was first kissed.
The last thing that came to Ashley’s mind was her parents. They had died in a tragic plane crash two years before over the Atlantic Ocean on the way back from Paris, when Ashley was only eighteen. She was an only child, so the house and all of their small fortune went to her. The house itself was beautiful, it was a shade of gray, a bit darker than it used to be, when the paint was fresh. The house had two stories and trees all around it, so that all the windows were covered with shade in the afternoon. The whole property was surrounded with a white picket fence.
Ashley, becoming aware that she needed to get to work, closed the door and started the car. She backed out of the driveway slowly and pulled into the street.
As she passed the other two story houses in the utopian suburbia, she rolled down her window to get some fresh air in the car. The breeze was cool against her skin, and soon her mind again began to wander. In her comatose state, she passed a stop sign and a car honked at her.
When she opened her eyes, she became disoriented. She was no longer in the familiar comfort of her Toyota Paseo, but instead she was on a dark green Honda motorcycle. The houses to her sides seemed to be getting more and more sparsely placed as she cruised along the road, and the trees became more and more dense. She didn’t know where she was going anymore.
Soon Ashley was surrounded by dense trees, the oak, birch, maple, and ash of the suburbs quickly turning into the fir, pine, and cedar of the Pacific Northwest. She drove the motorcycle down the road which now was cracked and in desperate need of repair. The trees off to the left side of the pavement seemed to raise from their level position up to a hill, and eventually were atop a steep rock cliff while on the right side of the road, the trees dropped off and soon Ashley was on a road a hundred feet above the water surface of a reservoir. The brownish green water was being restrained behind some unseen barrier behind her as she drove into the sun, rising up over the mountains.
She seemed to not even be driving the motorcycle anymore, and her mind wandered off as so many thoughts went through her head.