The Feeling Begins
The novel opens with Icy recalling the day she turned ten. In addition to being memorable as a landmark birthday event, turning ten is easily recalled due to events occurring the same week. When the condition that would change her life kicked into high gear:
To this day I can still remember my first urge—so intense it was like, like an itch needing to be scratched. I could feel little invisible rubber bands fastened to my eyelids, pulled tight through my brain, and attached to the back of my head.
Movies
The narrator describes how as a child she would immerse herself in the flickering fantasies of the movie screen. And like most creative individuals, she describes those images not as external projections onto a wall, but as metaphorical reconditioning her own life experiences:
I became Shirley Temple, tap-dancing across the floor, or Joan Crawford, mysterious and dark, scheming for money, plotting out murder.
Darkness
The defining metaphor of post-19th century fiction is littered throughout the novels and short stories of the last century-plus. Sometimes it appears just once. Other writers cling to it as an essential psychological construct. Such is the case here:
“When I opened my mouth, it seemed as though all the darkness of the root cellar was being drawn into it.”
“Closing my eyes, I felt the darkness, like loneliness, envelope me.”
“I’m getting sick and tired of your nastiness. Darkness is the only thing you see.”
“I try to act strong and brave, but there’s a darkness inside me.”
Character Description
As narrator, Icy reveals a particularly gifted talent for descriptive metaphor as applied to other characters. This can be a tricky thing when writing in the first-person: are you reading the cleverness of the writer or the character? But Icy has something about her that makes her use of language seem believable. Of course, in the case of the Nurse Ratched-type Wilma, it would likely come easy:
One the pious Virgin Mary, she now had changed. Her features were sharp and seething, her body was oozing hatred. So completely dark was her evil that like a magnet she drew me to her.
Revenge
Metaphor is used quite effectively to reveal the way that the rational reaction to a slight can quick erupt into a vortex of tornadic fury, ready to be unleashed against the perceived enemy with the fury of devastating twister. Ellipses are used here for the sake of reduction and to focus specifically on the multitude of metaphorical imagery:
Icy Gal, get your out your bombs!...An eye for an eye. A tooth for a tooth. A payback in spades…red-hot anger boiling in the pit of my stomach...Deserves my wrath, I persisted until I was almost hugging my hatred, loving and accepting it as an integral part of me when, out of nowhere, a truth…burned through me and brought me to my senses…my rage would fuel impulses too horrible to contemplate.
