Joseph Smith died at age thirty-nine in a prison after being charged with polygamy. As the story goes, a crazed, gun-wielding mob broke into the jailhouse, where Joseph was standing at a second-story window. When they shot him, the force of the bullets pushed his body through the glass, and as he fell down and down, with his last breath he cried out, “O Lord, my God!” His body slammed into the ground and then— Well, what then? … What happens after the fall of a prophet, when the crutch of faith is ripped away and God is buried with him? 

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Published in The Iowa Review 46.2, 2016