A Victim of the Mormons

Copenhagen’s gaslit avenues become a hunting ground when a velvet-voiced Utah emissary, draped in biblical certainty, spies a flaxen-haired pianist whose laughter still carries cathedral echoes. In less time than it takes a candle to gutter, he spirits her across an ocean, her white gloves left trembling on the pier like cast-off dove wings. The train that races toward Salt Lake is a steel confession booth: every clack of the wheels chisels another commandment into her compartment wall—thou shalt submit, thou shalt share, thou shalt forget the sea. She answers with mute arpeggios on the window, tracing remembered Chopin against the frost while prairie stars leer like polygamist eyes. At the final red-brick harem, her silhouette—now wrapped in prairie dust—pauses at the threshold, and for one heartbeat the camera hesitates too, unsure whether to bless or burn the scene.