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First published at Entropy Magazine on 19 July 2016.

Many thanks to editor Megan Broughton for accepting this very favorite story as part of Entropy’s “Variations on a Theme: Music” series.

This story has a lot of my favorite themes: Orphean mythology, the creative process, marriage, and blurred lines.

I used to listen to the Minimal Man Safari album back in college — those who’ve known me a long time know those were days spent as a DJ at radio stations and clubs when vinyl still ruled.  The album art (sadly, I sold my copy of this album years ago and did not have an image of my own) was screen grabbed, and I cannot find who owns the image to provide proper attribution so if you know who the photographer is, please tell me.

I love repetitive motifs in music and literature, think Brandenberg Concertos or… “Pull Back the Bolt” by Minimal Man. It was the untrained vocals of Patrick Miller that kept me coming back to the song — most of what I listened to in the 1980s was not at all mainstream, unsurprisingly.

I had forgotten the album cover image, and am struck by how perfectly it fits this story — a woman covered in paint in front of a canvas, in a story about a goddess being freed by an artist.  How beautiful.

There is also an allusion to Yeats and a colt in this story.  Here’s W.B. Yeats’s poem, “The Fascination of What’s Difficult”:

The fascination of what’s difficult

Has dried the sap out of my veins, and rent

Spontaneous joy and natural content

Out of my heart. There’s something ails our colt

That must, as if it had not holy blood

Nor on Olympus leaped from cloud to cloud,

Shiver under the lash, strain, sweat and jolt

As though it dragged road metal. My curse on plays

That have to be set up in fifty ways,

On the day’s war with every knave and dolt,

Theatre business, management of men.

I swear before the dawn comes round again

I’ll find the stable and pull out the bolt.

I hope you enjoy the story!  Read it here at Entropy Magazine.