When you are an over-the-road trucker you will find yourself with no shortage of time on your hands. A guy can't drive a truck for more than a couple of months without getting bored with music and looking for a radio show that is more interesting to him. Some guys turn to sports talk, others to news. More than a few drivers can be spotted with a stack of audio books on their dash board. Paul found his attention to be captivated by the paranormal. He had been driving for only a couple of weeks when he stumbled onto an all night show that addressed topics like ghosts, aliens, and demons. 17 years later he still tuned in every night that he was up late enough to get the opportunity. This evening he wasn't driving late, but he had been waiting for this episode ever since the host had announced it and he wouldn't have missed it for anything.

I wish we would have never moved. After the incident at the party, however, it was necessary. My mom had a friend who used to live at the same motel where we did, and she told her of another motel a couple towns over where she was staying now. We moved there, and times got tough quickly. The guy who owned the place knew what my mom did for a living, and he was okay with it so long as she gave him 50% of what she made on top of the rent. We didn't have much food on account of that, and mom got generic cigarettes if she was lucky. By the time the rent was paid, all we really had money for was hot dogs and the drugs my mom used incessantly by that point.

Lawson Hole was every bit as beautiful as I remembered it. The snow melt every year feeds the river, making it run wild across the rocks in the gorge nestled between the mountains. I don't suppose I would be considered much of a romantic guy, but I think I did a pretty good job picking this place out for our picnic. Ashley had been lost in thought but the hiss of the brakes snapped her back to reality. "You have to use the bathroom or something?" I smiled across the truck at her. "Nope." She looked confused. "Why are we stopping here?" My smile grew bigger. "It's a surprise. Hop out and help me with something from the trailer."

When Ashley and I first embarked on our journey together, I suspected that in short order I would get tired of her company. I wasn’t being pessimistic, but I had always been on my own to a large degree. Growing up, my school schedule was in a bit of a conflict with my mother’s work schedule. She was often sitting at the desk naked applying makeup when I got home from school, getting ready to go out on another nights work. And while she would stop in and check on me from time to time, I typically wouldn’t see her until the next day when I got home. After leaving the house, I had been by myself in college, and I had been trucking solo ever since.The thoughts of my impending boredom with my new reality didn’t surface much after my initial assertion. They would occasionally cross my mind only when the seasons would change, or something else would bring to the forefront the amount of time that had passed since we met.

After Sooner took her swan dive into the after-life, I entered into a new phase of my life. For awhile, I wondered why Hollywood had haunted my dreams so badly leading up to the event, and then appeared to urge me to get rid of the girl. Unfortunately, she had not returned since the incident that she had inspired for me to be able to ask her for clarification, so I was forced to draw my own conclusions. The only answers that I could come to in my mind were inconclusive and often contradictory. For awhile, I simply thought that she could not rest in peace thinking that I had killed her and her alone, as if the thought of being one of several was more akin to her liking than the thought of being the only. Yet this contradicted her philosophy in life, and her religious beliefs, so it could not be that. I entertained the notion that perhaps I had simply imagined some significance to the dreams that wasn’t really there, but that didn’t fit me. I dreamed frequently without looking for meaning in the jumbled pictures, so why would I do that in just this specific instance?