*sequel to In Your Atmosphere*
1966 was a year of seismic changes for the Beatles. By the end of the year, the last single Beatle, Paul McCartney, was on the verge of saying "I do" to his California sweetheart, Marisol Hemingway. And then life happe...
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On the 10th of February, Paul got out of bed, stretched, and shoved aside the heavy purple drapes.
"It's getting better," he said, squinting into the soft morning sunlight.
"Turn it off," Marisol said, squeezing her eyes closed.
"Getting better all the time," Paul added, and he laughed.
"Why are you laughing?"
"Remember when we went to Australia with Jimmy Nicol that time Ringo was feeling poorly? Every time we asked Jimmy how it was going, he'd say 'It's getting better.' That's all he ever said."
Marisol mumbled a response and turned away from the onslaught of sun.
She'd been up until 3 am the night before typing on her new word processor. Lost in the plotting, her fingers flying over the keys, pausing only to thumb through Roget's Thesaurus for a better word. Although her Papa always said not to use Roget. "The word you find in a thesaurus is never the right one," he'd say.
But then, Papa also said not to think about your writing once you'd stopped for the day. That way your subconscious would be working on it while you were busy listening to other people and noticing everything. Marisol found she did the opposite—plotting the next scene and running dialog in her head until Paul whistled or Angela snapped her fingers in front of her nose.
"She's away with the fairies again," Angela would say.
"She's dreaming about my dick again," Paul would say, and Angela would make a retching sound.
Both of them were wrong, most of the time. She was typically on the imaginary planet Anglia, picturing a young girl with tawny skin and black hair escaping the wreckage of her spacecraft and the purple-haired, light-eyed girl watching in disbelief from the edge of a forest. That would be the first scene she would ask Kim Moon to draw. The moment when Luna sees Romina fall from the sky. Quite a shock for a girl who comes from a planet of people who have not yet discovered flight.
Marisol cracked open one eye, adjusting to the brightness. Paul hadn't closed the drapes, and he was making the usual pot of noise, whistling and humming and tapping out percussion on anything that got in his way as he went about his morning bathroom routine. She yawned and pushed back the covers and stretched her arms over her head, her mind already running ahead to the page where she'd stopped typing last night.
Just then Paul came out of the en suite bathroom, dropping a T-shirt and pajama bottoms in the doorway. When he saw she was awake, he dazzled her with a smile. "Morning my beautiful bride. You look lonely in that there big bed."
Marisol's lips curved as she took in the pleasing sight of her naked and semi-aroused husband. He still had it. The tingle factor. But first she needed to tap into that beautiful, creative brain of his.
