This story is set in February and March of 2018

“It’ll be the worst since ’82,” is the phrase I keep hearing under hushed breath in the hallways, in the lecture halls, on the quad around where the geese go to feed and those who are rushed across the grass toward class. Everywhere, in every corner of the library and at every table in the food halls, I hear that line:

“Worst since ’82.”

The whole university is under an umbrella of suspicion and dread. The talk takes on a gaseous quality, permeating and existing everywhere, so strong and pungent that you can smell it and breathe it. The more theatrical students go out of their way to flare-up that line with ominous tones: “The worst since eighty-two.” It’s like if Poland got tipped off about Hitler possibly-maybe invading and were just starting to talk about it.

“I heard they already have tanks as close as Poznan.”

“Didn’t you hear?—President Deeks is being investigated for sexual misconduct.”

“Putin wants to absorb Belarus. Can you believe it?”

“It’ll be the worst since nineteen eighty-two.”

What the hell is going on? What, did Godzilla finally invade Tokyo? What’s with all the gloom and doom? Why is everyone talking so disquietly? You’d have thought the bombs would be falling over our heads as we speak, and that we should start hiding under our desks.

Well, the perpetrator of all this fear turns out to be Emma, a windstorm that will surely arrive any day now and leave in its wake a path of death and destruction. Surely. “The Beast from the East” they call it. You could intone, “It’s the end of the world, I don’t want to die,” the same way you would that “’82” line and it wouldn’t sound preposterous or extraneous. People speak about it quietly or internalize it silently like it’s a horrible atrocity looming somewhere but hasn’t fully materialized yet.

A building full of children is on fire, but you are watching it on TV, not directly involved. A student in your lecture was murdered, but you didn’t know him very well. The talk of the school had that sort of feeling to it.

Some classmates tell me that Dublin could get up to ten centimeters of snow in one day (For those familiar only with the imperial system, that’s about four inches). And when they tell me this, they make it a point to really hammer home the menacing quality of it by adding Grand Canyon-sized spaces between “ten” and “centimeters.”

“Ten…centimeters……Ten!”

Everyone is uniformly dreading the coming storm. What’s going to happen? Do I need to call my parents? But I wasn’t dreading it at all. In fact, their reactions often caused me to flash that Mona Lisa half-grin where one side of your mouth just barely cracks—or even yet, if they say it histrionically enough, I laugh.

I’m not saying this to sound tough or brave or anything. Far from it; I am the Brian Johnson of the Breakfast Club. I am no intrepid light in the dark. My amusement from all this mass hysteria comes from the fact that I am a born-and-raised upstate New Yorker. In other words, where I come from, eight feet of snow towering above the roof of your car and barbecuing outside in your underwear when it’s negative seven degrees (Celsius, that is—I’ve gotten quite used to the SI system) isn’t outside of the norm.

Our winters last half the year. Snow banks piled high as multilevel office buildings are standard sights. Cabin fever from the weather is a common mental state. There needs to be a bare minimum of three feet of snow within a 24-hour period to even warrant a half day of school. The Buffalo-Rochester-Syracuse-Albany collective unanimously agrees that while those from NYC can be pretty tough, they can be some milquetoast, pansy-ass doormats when it comes to snow, compared to how much we’re forced to bear.

And Dublin will be destroyed by four inches of snow.

My reactions puzzle many of my peers. “What’s funny?” they ask. “This is heavy.”

“I mean,” I say back, trying to downturn the ends of my lips to keep the grin away, “is that a lot?”

“More than anything any of us have ever seen.”

“Sounds dangerous.” I try saying this as flatly as possible.

“No,” they say back. “I don’t think you understand,” and the whole thing goes on and on and on. Ireland is not used to the snow. It hardly ever drops below freezing here. Winters in this country are much like the winters of Seattle: just rain. Actually, no, I would hardly even call it rain; it’s more like this drizzling mist that hangs there in the air. There’s also the occasional heavy winds that might knock down a stop sign or two, but generally speaking, winters in Ireland are pretty temperate and uneventful.

So this storm (“storm”—heavy quotes) has everyone in a ruckus. There’s talk of the school closing its doors, the entire public transportation shutting down. Society will collapse under the weight of this snowfall. Suffice it to say, my Rochester friend Yaro and I share many a laugh about this.

Still, with everyone else losing their marbles, I’m afraid that the supermarkets will be raided and left empty of food if I wait too long to go shopping. I go to all the supermarkets in a kilometer radius around my apartment the night before the storm sweeps over the city, and everything—I mean absolutely everything—is gone. All the checkout lines are chocked with frantic buyers. Most of the stores have already shuttered their windows, most likely already bought up of all their inventory. Walkways be damned—everyone’s running to and fro across the streets with bags of food and batteries in both hands, rushing about, hurrying their kids along. I have enough food to last me, but still, it’s a minor annoyance to have there be nothing left anywhere.

It comes when I’m sound asleep. When I eventually wake up and look out the window, I see it: that horrifying, deadly, carnivorous four inches of snow.

There are no cars nor people out on the street. I check the school website and see that classes are canceled for the next three days. They don’t even wait to see how the city handles the snow: they just hit the panic button, and now everything’s on lockdown. All buses and DART trains are kept from running until further notice. Every single store is closed.

I find three of my flatmates in the kitchen, sipping down hot tea or cocoa. They’re from Connecticut, Massachusetts and Michigan, so they know what a real winter looks like, and, as the one from Connecticut puts it, “This is like a dusting in April.”

We all talk and have a hearty guffaw about our superior handling of the snow and Ireland’s dire attitude toward such a weak sprinkling, feeling all high and mighty as snow weathered Americans of the Northeast. I then go outside in the clothes I slept in, just to see what it’s like.

The cold is different. The Irish winter cold is soggy and damp and sinks right into your bones; it’s like wading through a cold pool. But the storm beat out much of the humidity, so now it’s that surface level, stinging cold that I’m much more used to and find far more comfortable. I go back in, put on a hoodie and my boots, and step back out, the weather feeling like it’s an even ten Celsius now. Some people have stepped out of their homes at this point. There’s a group of children seeing snow probably for the first time and playing with it, touching it with their hands, feeling it on their cheeks. Even some of the parents don’t know what they’re looking at.

I go around the block to see if there are maybe any stores open. More and more people step out of their homes. There’s a snowball fight between teenagers going on in a cramped alleyway. I walk around the block, then turn back down Parnell Street toward O’Connell, but no luck. That street is one of the busiest streets in the city, and if that one is dead, then the whole city has shut down indefinitely. No commerce, no trade, no nothin’. The economy is on pause.

I walk the length of O’Connell, passing the Spire, the Jim Larkin Statue and the Monument, and then down a stretch of the river, which is at low tide at this time, to see how the homeless made it. Most of them are gone, but there are still a scattered few scrunched up under store awnings or in the alleyways under staircases. I’d have gone and bought them a blanket or two if the stores weren’t closed.

Not much can be done in a city when it is shut down. Most of my time is spent reading in my room or people-watching from my window. As time passes and one day falls into the next, the streets regain their normal amount of foot traffic. Not that there are any stores to shop in or any jobs to work; they all just go out to break that torture of being trapped indoors.

I go out every now and again to feel the pulse of the city. Everywhere, especially on the second day, there are snowball skirmishes between people of all ages, races and creeds. Little snow barriers are erected under dead electric timetables with old men hurling snowballs at kids of twelve or thirteen. The size of the street correlates directly with how large the battles are.

Parnell and Gardner Street Lower are of modest width, so each individual fight in that area might constitute ten to twelve soldiers. But on O’Connell, the battles are significantly grander in scale, with maybe thirty or forty on each side of the invisible line. Even around the Jim Larkin Statue, there is a battle involving over a hundred people dashing back and forth, no sides at all, whipping snow around in a mad fury, ducking, darting, kicking the stuff up. I don’t take part: I just watch from the sideline for a while then leave.

More engagements on the bridges over the river, the arch providing the agreed upon division of sides. I ask one person on the street if there are any stores open, and he says, “No, man, Dublin’s fuckin’ dead.”

That’s it: dead. It was bombed, and we had all come out from our shelters. That’s what it sure feels like. Infrastructure—gone. Law enforcement—non-existent. Political control—get out of town. It’s so surreal how such a major metropolitan area can so quickly turn off from such a seemingly inane external force. But here it is. The capital of a country tuned to a dead channel due to technical difficulties.

But it isn’t fun for everyone. By the third day, a lot of people have had their fill of the snow and are once again sheltering themselves indoors. Only a few adults occasionally pass along the sidewalk outside my window. The streets are now ruled by marauding children, ages eight to fourteen, in gangs of twenty or so, who cause as much havoc as they can. They try jimmying open the shutters of stores to try to get inside, but I don’t see any of them succeed. They run around, just fwak walls with cricket bats for the hell of it, kick over garbage cans and try to break windows with them, though they’re too weak to succeed with this either. However, they seem to spend most of their time standing around, acting intimidating to passersby and using snow as a weapon.

There’s one of these gangs of twenty that hang outside my building for a couple days and nights. They stand along the side of Parnell Street and throw snowballs and water bottles at the unlucky couples walking by with their heads down. They laugh maniacally. They egg an old woman and she goes down hard. A group of four adults passes by and they’re quickly surrounded. One kid bashes a man over the head with a slab of solid ice, and he goes down too, holding his head with both hands. A slow moving car rolls along, and the kids pelt it with snow and run in its path. A taxi comes shortly after, with the kids all running in front of it, and the driver swerves as much as he can to avoid them without spinning out or hitting a light post.

At the intersection, still in view of my window, a kid opens the driver side door of the taxi and pegs the driver, first with just a snowball, but then he keeps plugging his closed fist into the driver’s face as the rear tires spin and fling up snow, groping for traction, stalled out, stranded at the intersection. When the tires find concrete, there’s a harsh squalching sound as the taxi peels out, causing the driver side door to slam on its own inertia, leaving the punching kid off to the side and unsatisfied with how many punches he got in, both arms out and probably thinking, “I could have gotten a few more swings in.”

The snow seems to be a catalyst for their violence. I can tell they’re scared inside and don’t know what to do with themselves.

They hit people in the legs with fallen branches. They push and take things too far. People simply try and ghost their way past, ignoring the huge snowballs being smashed upon their heads. I move into the kitchen to get a better view, and the flatmate from Michigan and I watch all this happen with coffee in our hands, exclaiming to each other how crazy it all is.

They stop cars at the intersection and try to open the doors. On the fourth day of the storm, two men, one with a lead pipe, the other, older one with an umbrella, try jumping the kids from an alleyway to scare them away, but the two men are surrounded and shoved to the ground. A fat kid laughs to the sky. A few people are kicked when they’re down, but they promptly get up and scurry away. Jesus.

I walk out on that fourth day and stand on the sidewalk, leaning against the wall with my hands in my pockets, three floors below my apartment, and look at them from across the street. I look at them hard. I don’t know why I do this; I guess I just want an excuse to do something. A few of them notice me and shout something too thick-accented for me to understand, but I don’t budge. I want to see if they’ll make a move. As most of them don’t notice me, the few outliers who are keyed into me keep their distance just as I am keeping mine. I stand there a few minutes, then go back inside.

The fourth and fifth days are the weekend, so classes begin again on the sixth. Most of the snow has melted already, but there’s still talk of “Can you believe it?” going on. The storm sure put a dent in all our professors’ lesson plans. But besides that, everything is up and running again. The traffic is healthily congested, businesses are making hand over fist, and the cops are patrolling the streets once more. Those bands of kids are gone with the storm.

It’s back to that saturated cold again where no matter how many layers you wear you can feel it seeping through your sweat glands. What a shame. At least the buses are running and they have heating inside them. At least everyone has the same idea and has crammed themselves at the bus stop outside of campus after lectures have ended. I’m one of the literal hundred students waiting there, and the darndest thing happens on that day after the storm:

Two dogs, one big and one small, appear from around the corner, coming off the highway bridge at the intersection down the street. They look at the cars coming from the bridge, then start coming in the direction of the bus stop, skirting the far side of the road, sniffing the bushes as they go, the big one leading the little guy.

Traffic changes, and they both wander into the street. The big dog looks curiously at a black car as it breaks and swerves around it. Then the dogs come close to us all waiting at the bus stop and walk right by, nonchalance in their stride, going toward campus. I notice they both have collars on, but I notice it too late, and nobody else gets a chance to read them. They disappear from us so casually, tails wagging, the big dog once again in the lead.

Such are the events, I suppose, that transpire when Dublin receives a light dusting.