The painter wiggled two three-foot stretcher bars into two eighteen-inch ones and added a gorilla-glued brace and corner supports. They then used a staple gun and a canvas grip to affix fine linen to the wood. They primed the linen using the centuries-old rabbitskin-glue ingredients and technique.

In light Conté crayon the painter sketched the curvature of the ice moon, the circle of the giant ringed planet it orbited, a hovering spacecraft, and an infant giraffe standing with splayed legs on the ice moon’s surface.

The painter frisketed the moon, planet, rings and giraffe so that they would be unpainted when the spectacular background of stars and galactic band were built from Mars Black, Payne’s Gray, Alizarin Crimson, Naples Yellow, Titanium and Zinc Whites, and Pthalocyanine Blue. The background took a day.

The gas giant and rings and hovering spacecraft took three days. Red Oxide, Burnt Sienna, and Ultramarine Blue were added to the palette.

The surface of the ice moon took twenty minutes. A few dots of Cerulean Blue became streaks with a few deft strokes of a palette knife.

The painter improvised a semitransparent structure near the giraffe, with glowing, flitting shapes that implied small flying lifeforms within. Most of the structural work was done in about an hour but fine-tuning took three.

The giraffe was of Earthly shape but they gave it an unEarthly pelt of circuitry such as is found on a computer’s motherboard. A glowing giraffe’s heart, the color of bright sunshine seen through thin ear flesh, revealed the localized transparency of the giraffe.

Almost finished, the painter added implied distant sunlight, shadows, and a few unifying thisses and thats. They stepped back and wondered why something seemed to be missing, shrugged, and went away and had a meal and a nap. Upon return the painter grinned, nodded, and quickly painted loops of the whizzing lifeforms, in sharper detail than the ones within the semitransparent structure, encircling the giraffe here and there. A bit of glow was added to the giraffe where the forms flew close to the pelt’s circuitry.

The painter signed and dated their finished piece. On the back of the canvas they wrote

“Trojan Giraffe.” 18″ x 36″. Alkyd on linen.

The painter added their right thumbprint, in Alizarin Crimson as always.

Then the painter cursed heartily that neither they nor their painting were anything but a figment of a poet’s imagination. Their last words, making the walls of their magnificent loft apartment ring, were “I deserve to live more than you do, you cheap hack. Painting is HARD WORK. Poetry is lazy daydreaming!”