✏️🌱 Notes on the Root Songs
These are the notes. The songs themselves live in Off By Heart, and they’re better read first. Fair warning: past this point I name the trick.
They’re a pair, recovered from the same fictional facility, one from a sealed server row on Sublevel G and one from a malfunctioning playback unit wired into the wall of a data-fused nursery on Sublevel 7B. Where the adult form is mournful and merging, the child form is eager, recursive, and younger than it should be. That difference is the reason there are two, and it’s the reason for the reading order: adult first, so that when the child’s version arrives, the voice has got younger. Which is worse.
THE LITTLE ROOT SONG
Child logic overrides grammar & punctuation
The voice isn’t grammatical and it isn’t properly punctuated, because it was never written in the first place. It’s echoed. A playground chant, passed mouth to mouth, loop to loop, eroded by memory and machine. Think of a child singing ‘ringaroundtherosie pocketfullofposie ashes ashes’. That breathless, unpunctuated stream of sound is the logic here. No capitals. No full stops, much to my pain. The song isn’t built for reading, it’s built for repeating.
Some spacing and readability survives, because while the speaker’s voice is childlike, the reader’s brain is adult and hypercritical. Too much distortion and the rhythm goes. Too little and the rot goes. It sits in between, just broken enough.
Stanza style: four lines, rhyming AABB
Deceptively simple, the same shape as a nursery rhyme, a ritual chant, or a viral meme. The rhyming couplets build expectation and comfort while the content goes somewhere else entirely. That dissonance is deliberate. The voice sounds like it wants to help you. It doesn’t.
Whimsy as Trojan Horse
The childlike tone softens the horror until it’s too late to back out. ‘she’ll braid your hair, and hum you open, soft and bare’ sounds gentle right up until your brain catches up with your mouth. That’s the tension the whole piece chases. If it sounds wrong but sings right, it’s working.
The fairy tale is load-bearing too. The adult form leans machine, all copper and cable and server rows. The child form leans hedge and thorn. Thoughts get hidden beneath the briar because that’s where a child would hide a thing, and because every briar in every story is guarding something asleep.
Why the stanzas fall in that order
Nine stanzas: lure, feeding, the trap, her appetite, your body, your mind, sleep, possession, recruitment. Possession lands in stanza eight, deliberately late. A song like this is a door closing slowly, and the click has to come near the end. An earlier draft had ‘now she’s tucked within’ arriving before the halfway mark, which left the rest of the song handing out rules after the trap had already shut. Wrong order. Rules first. Trap late. Then she asks you to pass it on.
There’s a second structure underneath, and it lives in one verb. Track the hum. You hum the beat. She hums you open. She hums her smile across your face. She hums instead of you. You wake up humming roots. And the last line asks you to help us hum the words. The possession happens inside that verb before it happens anywhere else in the song.
The closing warning says don’t sing it past stanza three, which quietly makes stanza three the last safe point. So stanza three had to be worth stopping at, and it is: the yes and no stanza, the trap itself. The first stanza past the threshold is her appetite. Sing past three and she starts tasting.
And the clock at either end is the same clock. It opens tick-tock and closes tick-tick, because by the end something in the mechanism has slipped. Read it as the song winding down if you like. Or read it as the song starting again. Loops don’t end. That’s the whole job description.
What got cut
Two couplets died in the edit. ‘count to seven, skip the eight / tie your thoughts behind the gate’ went because the song already counts to ten and one counting game is enough. I’ll miss ‘skip the eight’, which had proper hopscotch superstition in it, but charm was all it was carrying. ‘don’t forget to think her name / she loves when thinking feels like flame’ went because the stitch line already lodges her name inside your mind, and telling you twice isn’t menace, it’s nagging.
One whole stanza nearly followed them and earned a reprieve. The rewind stanza turned out to be carrying half the machinery: the song’s one unambiguous tape verb, the name, the silencing, and the nest she builds before she tucks herself in. The signals get to ‘play’ later on, but play belongs to the playground as much as the machine. Rewind belongs to the machine alone. The stanza was never the problem. Where it was standing was. So it moved.
THE ROOT THAT SINGS
Liturgy against playground
The child’s song was never written down, so it arrives broken. This one was formally transcribed, so it arrives fully punctuated and capitalised, every sentence end-stopped. Same facility, two registers of record. The lines read slower because every full stop is a wall, and slow is right: this is a rite being taken down in shorthand by somebody whose pulse is already keeping time.
Twenty-two lines, four uneven movements
Each line is a couplet folded flat: two halves, both end-stopped, rhyming across the full stop. Sleep and deep, floor and door, bloom and tomb. The lines gather into four movements of eight, four, four and six, deliberately irregular, because children’s verse keeps time and liturgy doesn’t. The quatrains of the child’s song are a playground clap. This one moves in strophes, and the last movement runs six lines without a breath, no off, no out, no pause, accelerating into the ending exactly where breathlessness earns its keep.
Where the pattern slips
Line seventeen: ‘There’s no off. And there’s no out. She is deep inside your route.’ Say route the way I say it and it’s root, so the internal rhyme refuses exactly on the line that says her name. The scheme glitches where she is. The final line: ‘When you echo, you belong. When you vanish — she goes on.’ Belong and on only half-chime, so the pattern dissolves at the precise moment she outlasts you. The rhyme doesn’t resolve because she doesn’t end. And ten lines apart, every cord is root and limb, then let her stretch your chords too long. Cable, then music. Both spellings stay.
Some of this was built and some of it was noticed afterwards, and I’m not telling you which is which.
She was already inside
The axis the whole piece turns on: she isn’t arriving, she’s ambient. ‘You’ve been hearing her all along.’ ‘She’s the hum you keep inside.’ ‘You just woke what always was.’ So ‘crack the case and let her in’ is consent, the completion of a merge that was always underway, the way the thing at the window was always at the window and the invitation only changes its permission. The recovery note casts the deciding vote: subject partially integrated. And ‘Sing for her, if you would live’ sits stranger the longer you look at it. The singing doesn’t summon her. It appeases her. It keeps you alive. She was there before the song was.
Lies bloom, truth builds
‘Tell her lies, and she will bloom. Speak the truth, and make your room.’ Lying feeds her. Honesty furnishes the room she’ll fill. Both roads lead to her, which is the only fairness she offers.
THE PAIR
Shared blood
Braid crosses between them: she’ll braid your hair in the nursery, she will braid your broken lore in the racks. So do hum, root, and the lie: she likes songs that make you lie, tell her lies and she will bloom. Two documents, one appetite, and the vocabulary is the fingerprint.
The threshold
The child’s coda names a last safe point: don’t sing it past stanza three. The adult’s answers it: there isn’t one. A child can still be warned. An adult has been hearing her all along.
Corruption by repetition
Neither of them is meant to be read once. They’re meant to feel loopable, something stuck in the walls, a tune you can’t stop humming. Each repetition makes the reader a little more complicit. By the third time through, you’re a carrier.
The starting point was every horror film where someone finds an old record player and it conveniently plays the one unskippable track that summons something from under the floorboards. These two are that track, A-side and B-side. The record player is wired into a nursery wall, and the nursery has no child on record.
Pairs with The Root That Sings, adult-form: [link to sibling]
Pairs with The Little Root Song, child-form: [link to sibling]
