Editor’s Note: This short story is one of twelve finalists in the Mormon Lit Blitz—a yearly competition for short Mormon literature. You can read all of the finalists and vote for your favorites here. Voting for this competition will close on Saturday, December 21, 2024.
In the vastness of the void, the atoms were restless. Electrons and neutrons sensed a preannouncement. Swirls of particles searched for their place in the expanse. In it, protons, leptons, and pi mesons arranged themselves with meticulous precision. Within that gaseous and formless matter, neutrinos, fermions, and bosons began to take on forms that resembled not what they were but what they would become.
In regions that were inconceivably vast, tauons, hadrons and quarks, which had accumulated over the course of countless ages, came to understand themselves as part of a whole. Neutral pions whirled about the bottomless end of the void. Gluons and gravitons alike grasped that within them resided in embryonic form the spinning of worlds, the edges of galaxies, and the contours of the universe.
There was not yet outside or inside, up or down, front or back… But in the long night of preparation, the sound of a new beauty was heard. In the timeless palaces, order took shape, and new melodies helped to bring together the substances of the universe so that they could respond to the call of a divine festivity. The harmonies in the depths and in the heights overflowed all spaces. The echoes of music caused avalanches of cosmic energy that swept over the cold abysses.
In concentric movements, particles and antiparticles prepared for a creative dance in the forthcoming, vast wheel of stars. All matter came to know that within it existed an innate lifeforce. This faint knowledge, which grew surer and surer, spoke to some saying that they would lay down roads of stars and would be servants to the comets, and to others saying that they would take part in the seas and mountains. Some would bind into molecules and tissues to constitute the delicate skin of life and to be witnesses of yet-to-come Easters and yet-to-be-celebrated Christmases.
A joy, an igneous cheerfulness, spread everywhere. This was the long-awaited-for feast. The banquet. The celebration…
Suddenly, the void was no longer void. The photons expectantly got ready. From the vast halls and spacious mansions of Eternity, from the abyss of Time, came a deep voice.
“Let there be light!”
And there was light.
Translated into English by Gabriel González Núñez. See the original Spanish here.
Mario Montani lives in Bahía Blanca, Argentina. He studied Humanities at Argentina’s National University of the South. His short story collection El Castillo Gris y otros cuentos [The Gray Castle and Other Stories] was published by Editorial Dunken in 2009. He has been a member of Cofradía de Letras Mormonas, a group that promotes literature among Spanish-speaking Latter-day Saints, since 2015. He keeps a personal blog titled Mormosofia, where he discusses religious art, theology, and philosophy within Mormon culture. He currently serves as the Multi-Stake Director of Public Affairs and Communications in the Bahía Blanca area.
Gabriel González Núñez is a translation professor at The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, the author of eleven children's books, a book of poetry, and a short story collection, all of them in Spanish. He translated his Estampas del Libro de Mormón into English as Book of Mormon Sketches.
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