It wasn’t really a superb work of art.

The artist had painted the sky the wrong colour and covered it with blotches in an attempt, seemingly, to hide his mistake; the perspective, what there was of it, was wrong; and the vegetation would not have been found in the wildest nightmare. The whole thing was a surrealistic portrait of hell. Even the frame barely held together. Jon kept it on the wall – one of the padded walls – of his cell. Strange and horrific though it was, it was some connection with the Outside, some reminder that there were other things beside eating, sleeping, and the occasional visit of the doctors. Sometimes they would watch him through the grille, in the padded door, and shake their heads. “No cure,” said one. “Unless we take away that – that picture,” said the other. “You will kill him if you do.” “He will kill himself if we don’t; you know that it was the cause of his –his –.” “His madness.” “There is no other word for it. That picture is the centre of his life now; I believe it is the only thing that he does not doubt. Yesterday he told me that it portrays the only true world, and that this one is really false. We can do nothing against such stubbornness.” “Then it is either kill or cure?” “Yes. I will tell him when I examine him. Perhaps the shock of having his world removed will cure him.”

It didn’t seem to. Jon still sat hunched and brooding in the corner of his cell, staring at the picture, trying to remember …

He heard the soft tread in the passage. They were coming to take away his picture; there was so little time left! He made one last, tremendous, despairing effort … And the cell was empty. They never did find out where he had gone or how he had escaped. It was a nine-day mystery; and, in the course of time, it was forgotten.

But the Doctor kept the picture, and hung it up in his study. He knew his suspicions were absurd, but they stuck. Sometimes he stares at the picture with all three of his eyes, with the green sun below the horizon, and hopes that he is wrong.

And how could anyone survive in a world of brown earth and green leaves, and a blue sky with only one sun? First published in ‘The Cygnet’, the school magazine, in 1965