#1960sfantasy

Yellow began at the edges.

It spilled across the lake in impossible ribbons, brighter than sunset had any right to be, until the whole horizon looked painted instead of real. Wells gripped the neck of his guitar and watched the color move, not over the water but through it, as if Lake Ontario had become some vast liquid mirror reflecting a world that had been hiding just beneath the surface all along.

The waves no longer sounded like waves.

They chimed.

Soft at first. Then layered. Notes inside notes, rippling outward in strange bright harmonies that seemed to rise from everywhere at once. The beach behind him dissolved into laughter, bells, brass, handclaps, voices. The air itself had become music, and it carried Wells with it before he had the chance to decide whether he wanted to go.

He stood too quickly, then stopped, he sat back down with his guitar in hand, staring.

The shoreline was gone.

Or rather, it was still there, but it had been remade. The sand beneath his feet shimmered in bands of gold and blue. The sky overhead swirled in painted spirals, yellow melting into sapphire, violet, and green. Clouds bloomed like flowers. Shapes drifted past that refused to stay one thing for long, smiling suns, floating hearts, bright-eyed fish gliding through the air as though the whole world had forgotten where the sea was supposed to end.

Wells laughed, breathless now, the sound caught somewhere between delight and disbelief.

“What in the hell…”

A voice behind him answered, cheerful and warm.

“Now that,” it said in a bright Liverpool lilt, “is more like it.”

Wells turned.

Four figures stood a little way off, not walking so much as arriving, as if they had stepped out of the music itself. They were unmistakable even before his mind fully caught up: sharp suits turned dream-bright, familiar faces remade in color and light, all of them carrying the kind of impossible ease that belonged only to legends and hallucinations.

The Beatles.

Not exactly as photographs had shown them. Not quite as real men either. They seemed painted and alive at the same time, like moving pieces of album art given voices and smiles and perfect timing. One of them tipped his head toward Wells’s guitar with amused approval. Another spread his arms to the transformed world around them as if to say, Well? You coming or not?

Wells blinked once, then laughed harder, unable to help it.

“Of course,” he said to no one and everyone at once. “Of course it’s you.”

The nearest of them grinned. “You wanted a song, didn’t you?”

And that was the strangest part of all: Wells could not remember if he had spoken the question aloud or if the world itself had simply heard him asking.

Before he could answer, the ground gave a soft, buoyant lurch beneath his feet.

A shape rose from the shining water.

At first it looked like a toy, some absurd floating dream in polished color. Then it rose higher, round and radiant beneath the yellow sky, and Wells saw it fully: a bright submarine, yellow and golden as sunrise, gleaming like something built from music and mischief and every impossible idea that ever seemed brilliant at the exact right hour.

It surfaced without a splash.

A hatch swung open.

One of the Beatles gave Wells an encouraging nod, as if boarding strange glowing vessels in the middle of a psychedelic revelation was the most natural thing in the world.

So Wells climbed in.

Inside, the submarine was larger than it should have been, all curved windows and vivid panels and rooms humming softly with color. The walls shifted in time to the beat still pulsing through the air. Piano notes drifted down from nowhere. Somewhere deeper inside, a drum thumped like a giant steady heart. Wells ran his hand along the smooth painted surface of the cabin and watched gold bloom under his fingertips like liquid light.

The Beatles moved through it as if it belonged to them. Or perhaps as if they belonged to it.

“Where are we going?” Wells asked.

The answer came with a shrug and a smile. “Forward.”

The submarine plunged.

Not into black depth, but into wonder.

Outside the windows, the world opened into a psychedelic sea alive with impossible beauty. Hills drifted underwater like sleeping giants. Strings of flowers rose like coral. Strange fish with human eyes and velvet colors swam past in stately processions. Trumpets bloomed from the seabed. Doors floated through open water with nowhere to lead except somewhere stranger. Every now and then Wells caught flashes of cities made of music, towers shaped like organ pipes, staircases made of piano keys, golden domes ringing with invisible choirs.

And all the while, the song he had failed to write at Sunnyside Beach began gathering around him.

Not as words on paper.

As truth.

He could feel it building in his chest, each image feeding it, each impossible color opening something wider inside him. The old frustration was gone. The old carefulness was gone with it. There was no room here for half-measures, no room for safe little lines crossed out in a notebook. This place demanded fullness. It demanded surrender. It demanded wonder.

Wells stood at one of the round windows and watched a yellow current sweep through the water like a ribbon of pure song.

“I think,” he said slowly, “I know what it’s about now.”

One of the Beatles, lounging nearby with the kind of calm only dream-figures could manage, looked up at him.

“Go on, then.”

Wells closed his eyes.

He saw the shore. The gold. The leaving behind. The noise falling away. The strange relief of not having to carry the old weight anymore. He saw himself stepping out of one world and into another, not because he had disappeared, but because he had finally arrived somewhere truer.

When he opened his eyes again, the underwater world beyond the glass had turned brighter still, as if the thought itself had changed the sea.

And somewhere far off, just beyond the submarine’s glowing path, he thought he could hear a crowd roaring, not for chaos, not for fame, but for release. For joy. For becoming.

Beatlemania, he realized with a sudden grin, was not just screaming fans and bright suits and records spinning under a needle.

It was surrendering to music so completely that it remade the shape of the world.

The submarine surged forward through yellow light.

Wells laughed, gripped the edge of the window, and let the song come.

Wells came back to himself with the hush of Lake Ontario in his ears and the last of the sunset cooling into dusk around him. The guitar still lay across his lap, the notebook half-open in the sand, its pages trembling lightly in the breeze as if they had been waiting for him to return. For a moment he simply sat there, breathing, the strange gold of the vision still lingering somewhere behind his eyes. Then, with a hand that felt steadier than before, he picked up his pencil, bent over the page, and wrote the first line at the top in clear, certain letters:

I reach the water of the quiet shore.

The End.