The Book of Mormon Girl Read Online Free

among the mists, none of them touching, but some of them talking softly in groups. “At birth you did not suddenly flare into existence out of nowhere,” the confident voice related. “You have always lived. In pre-earth life you lived with your Heavenly Father as his spirit sons and daughters. You learned, until you were ready to come to earth.”
    My mind reached back against its opaque limits, against the forgetting we called the “veil,” stretching for a glimpse of some corner of that pre-earthly life.
    Suddenly the screen split: on one side, the swirly pre-earth realms, on the other, the cold hospital, the masked doctor and nurse holding a newborn baby by his heels. “Upon entering mortal life, the memory of your life before birth was blotted out, that you might live by faith and further prepare for everlastingness,” the voice continued.
    I reached and remembered nothing but still felt the certainty of my own life, my spirit, like a long blue cotton thread from one of the spools in my grandmother’s sewing box, but without beginning or end.
    On the screen, the operating room melted into the unholy laugh of a nodding mechanical clown, the gateway arch of acarnival on a darkened studio lot. “Life offers you two precious gifts: one is time, the other—freedom of choice. You are free to exchange your time for thrills.”
    The headlights of a roller-coaster car flared out of the darkness and rushed by. The darkness of the carnival is a menace.
    “You may trade it for base desires.”
    The stockinged calves of four female dancers can-canned across the screen, red marabou boas floating along with them.
    “You may invest it in greed.”
    A sideshow barker wearing shirtsleeve garters spun a roulette wheel and flashed tickets to the captive crowd.
    “You may purchase with it vanity.”
    A man in a gray suit and fedora admired himself in a fun-house mirror, while his blond wife chortled gamely along.
    “You may spend it in pursuit of material goods.”
    Another man raised an air rifle to his shoulder and took aim at the mechanical ducks going round and round in the shooting gallery. Pop-pop-pop. The sideshow barker handed the wife a china doll, which slipped through her fingers and fell to the ground, where it broke into pieces. She makes a sour sound of disappointment.
    “But in these you will find no lasting satisfaction.”
    The woman gave her husband a disgusted look. How I disliked her, how I disliked the way she glared at her husband.Who wanted a china doll, really? Was that all this earthlife had for me?
    A series of ticking clocks converged on the screen.
    “Every minute, every hour, every day of your mortal life must be accounted for. Your eternal reward will be according to your choosing.”
    The camera panned down the length of a grandfather clock, as a gray-haired grandfather in a suit and tie adjusted his own pocket watch and showed it to his blond grandson who was wearing a plaid vest.
    How much better it must have felt to be in their warm bread-smelling house, I imagined, than it did in the dark carnival full of randomness and cheap prizes.
    “After death, though your mortal body lies in the earth, you, your spirit self, will continue to live.” The outline figure of a man steps up through a skyscape of amber and burgundy clouds.
    “Like coming out of a darkened room into the light, through death you will reemerge into a place of reawakening and find loved ones waiting to welcome you.”
    And so it was revealed: the man was the gray-haired grandfather, who left behind his pocket watch and traded his gray suit for clothes all in white. He stepped out of the mists, arms raised, into the embrace of his gray-haired wife and countless others clad in all white who stepped forward out of the mists to welcome him, as the Mormon Tabernacle Choir sang exultant.
    Seeing their embrace, I thought always of my own white-haired Utah-born grandmother, still alive, but thirty miles down the freeway. It always