Short Fiction

An Artist’s Life

A busman’s holiday. A real busman’s holiday. I stay on the moon for a year, I paint pictures there for three hundred and sixty-five days—then the first thing I do back on Earth is go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to look at more paintings. Brent smiled to himself. It had better be worthwhile.

He looked up the immense stretch of granite steps. They shimmered slightly in the intense August sun. He took a deep breath and shifted the cane to his right hand. Slowly he dragged himself up the steps … they seemed to stretch away into the oven like infinity.

He was almost there … a few more steps would do it. The cane caught between two of the steps, shifting his balance, and he was suddenly falling.

The woman standing in the shade at the top of the steps screamed. She had watched since he first climbed out of the cab. Brent Dalgreen, the famous painter, everyone recognized the tanned young face under bristly hair burned silver white by the raw radiation of space. The papers had told how his stay on the moon had weakened his muscles from low gravity. He had climbed painfully up the steps and now he was rolling hopelessly down them. She screamed again and again.

They carried him into the first aid room. “Gravity weakness,” he told the nurse. “I’ll be all right.”