the first line story, a work in progress:

While not the intended effect, the outcome was surprisingly satisfying. 

No one meant for the medication Julie took to make her dreams bleed into her days, but it did. She couldn’t tell when she was sleeping or when she was awake. Her life became a blend of the outrageous and the mundane, with no idea which was real. Her doctor told her she had been given a special gift, and so reluctantly Julie accepted it. "Doesn't everyone sometimes want their dreams to be real?" he asked, leaning forward in his chair. Julie stayed silent, she nodded, and he smiled and sent her on her way. 

One day the world would burst with the colors of fireworks fading across a sky, the next she would be curled up in front a fireplace in the body of herself as an old woman. She lived through tornadoes, staring as they grew so big and filled the sky with their green black mass, roaring toward her until the record skipped and she was somewhere else. She time traveled in her dreams and her life to memories until she forgot completely who she had been before she began her dream life. She went back to the basement of her Grandmother’s house, spending a whole day eating cheese and crackers and watching Charlie Brown’s Christmas Story over and over again. She went back to the first time she kissed a boy while they laid together in tall grass that itched their bare legs and arms. How he tasted like cotton candy, how he smelled of the coppery dirt. Other times she had brief glimpses where she almost realized, “Here I am, this is real!” Times where she would be in an office, working on a computer spreadsheet, something so devoid of imagination it surely could not be a dream. But then her life jolted forward and it was lost. 

 

It was a night at the end of August that Julie met Hernandez. She was never really sure if that was his last name or his first name, but it was the only name she had to call him by. She was sitting at the bar, clutching her knuckles around a long neck bottle of beer when she felt a finger poking into the back of her shoulder. “What are you doing here alone?” a deep voice asked her, not raspy, just coming from the depths of his body, somewhere near his stomach. She swivelled on her chair and saw a face, dark and crooked, the corner of his mouth turning up on one side into a grin. 

“I could ask you the same thing,” she felt herself saying, and thought instantly that she must be dreaming, she could never say something so smooth in a real life. But he smiled even more crookedly and sat beside her. She hoped it was real. 

He ordered a drink and ordered her another beer without asking her if she would like one. She felt dizzy when she felt his arm brush against her, his foot tangling with her own underneath the bar counter. They didn’t talk much, just smiled warmly at each other over the noise from the jukebox in the corner. When she finished the beer he bought her, he leaned into her hair and whispered, the cloud of his breath hot on her ear, “I have an idea. Come with me.” 

 

Julie wanted to ask where they were going and if he was real, but she was scared. Scared that the scene might change, that the colors would blur together, and that her life would once again move to another moment, the pages all out of order.