In the Woods
Description
Vocal Characteristics
Language
EnglishVoice Age
Young Adult (18-35)Accents
North American (General)Transcript
Note: Transcripts are generated using speech recognition software and may contain errors.
in the woods by Tana french prologue. Picture a summer stolen whole from some coming of age film set in small town, 1950s. This is none of Ireland's subtle seasons mixed for a connoisseur's palate, watercolor nuances within a pinch size range of cloud and soft rain. This is summer full throated and extravagant in a hot, pure silk screen 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 treehouses. 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 bird calls, bees, leaves and football bounces and skipping chants 1 2, 3. 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 shrill in among the black lace trees. This is every summer decked in all its best glory. Picture an orderly little maze of houses on a hill. Only a few miles from Dublin someday the government declared this will be a buzzing marvel of suburban vitality. A planned perfect solution to overcrowding and poverty in every urban ill while the government rasp indeed about mcdonald's and multi screens. A few young families escaping from the tenements and outdoor toilets that went unmentioned in 19 seventies Ireland or day dreaming big back gardens and hopscotch roads for their Children or just buying as close to home as a teacher's or bus driver's salary would let them Packed rubbish bags and bumped along a two track path, grass and daisies growing down the middle to their mint new start. That was 10 years ago. And the vague strobe light dazzle of chain stores and community centers conjured up under infrastructure has so far failed to materialize. Minor politicians still bellow in the dale unreported about shady land deals, farmers still pasture cows across the road and night flicks on. Only a sparse constellation of lights on the neighboring hillsides behind the estate where the sunday plans show the shopping center and the neat little park spreads a square mile and who knows how many centuries of wood move closer, follow the three Children scrambling over the thin membrane of brick and mortar that holds the woods back from the summer rides. Their bodies have the perfect economy of latency. They are streamlined and unselfconscious prepared to light flying machines, white tattoos, lightning bolt star a flash where they cut band aids into shapes and let the sun brown around them, a flag of white blonde hair flies out toehold knee on the wall up and over and gone. The wood is all flicker and murmur and illusion. Its silence is a pointless conspiracy of a million tiny noises, russell's flurries nameless truncated shrieks, it's emptiness. Teams with secret life scurrying just beyond the corner of your eye, careful bees zip in and out of cracks in the leaning oak, stop to turn any stone, and strange larvae will wriggle irritably, while an earnest threat of ants winds up your ankle in the ruined tower, someone's abandoned stronghold, nettles thick as your wrist seized between the stones and at dawn rabbits bring their kittens out from the foundations to play on ancient graves. These three Children own the summer. They know the wood as surely as they know, the micro landscapes of their own grazed knees, put them down blindfolded in any duller clearing, and they could find their way out without putting a foot wrong. This is their territory! And they rule it wild and lordly as young animals, they scramble through its trees and hide and seek in its Hollows. All the endless day, long and all night in their dreams, they are running into legend and to sleep over stories and nightmares that parents never here, down the faint lost paths. You would never find alone skidding around the tumbled stone walls. They stream calls and shoelaces behind them like comet trails, and who is it? Waiting on the riverbank with his hands in the willow branches, whose laughter tumbles sweating from a branch high above, whose is the face in the undergrowth in the corner of your eye, built of light and leave shadow there and gone in a blink. These Children will not be coming of age, this or any other summer. This august will not ask them to find hidden reserves of strength and courage as they confront the complexity of the adult world and come away sadder and wiser and bonded for life this summer has other requirements for them.