Cut into: a girl walking in a dark city, alleyways lead her to, lanes shifting and digging back into, through and around small buildings of Dublin, crammed on twisted streets. She arrives at an old movie theater the afternoon before she returns to America.
Her father grew up in Connecticut under 200 mile-an-hour winds. It would rain and freeze under his feet. He still holds the ice, implants it into their lineage. In thirty years she will watch a movie where a tall thin actor plays him, does him perfectly, better then he ever could.
To dissect the code in her consciousness it will take repeated beatings of films, curtains separating, coke commercials into trailers into, lights. The picture splits, tape flips over and over in her head. A story cast across the back of her scull decayed and full of holes.
During the winter of 1973 Connecticut's railway stations were shut down along with the highways and bridges. It rained all day and when the sun set, everything froze. Parking lots mirrored images, passengers sat stuck in train cars commuting back from New York, trucks in ditches off the sides of the road.
She left the movie theater, took two air planes back home. Over the counter drugs calm nerves. She quits drinking three times before it sticks, studies the lines that cross in her head, wave back and forth and spark behind her eyes. Thinks about uncovering Connecticut. The provocation of the ice storm makes thoughts separate into line breaks. Narrator dies on the page, in-between the space. A story she'll write for seven years until the curtain reopens: screen fades out.
