In the Woods

by Tana French

this is summer full-throated and extravagant in a hot pure silkscreen blue. This summer explodes on your tongue tasting of chewed blades of long grass, your own clean sweat, Marie biscuits with butter squirting through the holes and shaken bottles of red lemonade picnicked in tree houses. It tingles on your skin with BMX wind in your face, ladybug feet up your arm; it packs every breath full of mown grass and billowing wash lines; it chimes and fountains with birdcalls, bees, leaves and football-bounces and skipping-chants, One! two! three! This summer will never end. It starts every day with a shower of Mr. Whippy notes and your best friend’s knock at the door, finishes it with long slow twilight and mothers silhouetted in doorways calling you to come in, through the bats shrilling among the black lace trees. This is Everysummer decked in all its best glory.

“Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence,” he told me reproachfully.

Maybe she, like me, would have loved the tiny details and the inconveniences even more dearly than the wonders, because they are the things that prove you belong.

I don’t believe in the Church, do you get me? Any church. Religion exists to keep people in their place and paying into the collection plate.

And I don’t believe in any government. They’re the same as the Church, every one of them. Different words, same goal: keep the poor under your thumb and supporting the rich.

my mother had arranged my stuff all wrong in my new bedroom; it felt awkward and temporary, like hurriedly assembled refugee accommodation, not like a home.

“Did they surgically remove your palate at birth, or did you have to cultivate such an utter lack of refinement?

I read a lot. I always have, but in those two years I gorged myself on books with a voluptuous, almost erotic gluttony.