Root Sleep

Wren arrived at St. Hesper's for her final year with two suitcases, a battered paperback, and the quiet certainty that no one would remember her. She was a scholarship girl — quiet, neat, and the kind of student teachers liked, but her peers never noticed. Her mother called the place a golden ticket; Wren called it a greenhouse for well-bred girls who bloomed on cue.

She had grown up in a flat behind her mother's flower shop, her nights filled with the scent of carnations and buckets of cold water. Her mother taught her to prune precisely, talk to wilting violets, and listen for the thirst in leaves. Wren learned early that roots remember — and that some things grow better in silence. Plants, she understood — the way they leaned into light, the way they curled when ignored. Her mother said she was born with dirt in her veins. Maybe that's why Wren never felt out of place among ivy and shade.

The rooftop greenhouse was her refuge. Even silence seemed louder inside the greenhouse walls. Most students found it too hot, damp, or alive. In her second week, Wren asked the groundskeeper for the key. He didn't ask why; he just handed it over and warned her to avoid the left wing—"that part's not structurally sound," he said, his eyes avoiding hers.

She found the journal in a tin breadbox beneath a half-rotted bench. It was wrapped in oilskin, the pages crisp with age, and the writing looping, cursively, that smelled faintly of sap. The name on the inside cover read C.R., but in the margins, she had scrawled another name repeatedly—Chloris.

The entries began innocently. Notes about orchid care. Pressed fern leaves. Latin plant names followed by personal annotations: Aconitum — beautiful but secretive. Bleeds if cut.

But within a few weeks of entries, Chloris changed.

She spoke of "root-sleep" and "stem-binding," describing the sensation of her limbs growing heavy with sap, her bones hollowing out like stems. She wrote of the vines that watched her with patience, curling closer each night, their whispers growing bolder when she tried to sleep. The journal grew frantic — delight and terror entwined — as if Chloris were unsure whether she was blooming into something divine or rotting from within. One entry described her reflection lagging behind her body — her eyes going green in moonlight. Another described planting her fingernail to grow a double — a quieter version of herself, rooted and obedient.

Wren should have stopped reading. But something in the ink called to her — not just curiosity, but a strange kinship, as if loneliness had tuned her heart to the same frequency as the one that had written those frantic lines.

Instead, she began mixing the soil blend Chloris described: river sand, ash, iron filings, and a drop of her own blood. She pressed it into the cracked pot beside the off-limits door.

She began to dream of vines.

In her dreams, she was underground, her arms thin and woody, her breath the sound of sap flowing. She felt others beside her—girls with bark-like skin and hollowed eyes who whispered their names through roots. Sometimes, she woke with her arms crossed over her chest, fingers stiff, and the taste of moss on her tongue.

The changes came slowly. It began with a strange tightness in her joints, like her limbs were stiffening beneath her skin. Her fingertips tingled with a faint itch, and when she scratched them, she found tiny greenish threads beneath her nails. Her hair, once limp and brown, grew coarse, damp to the touch like overwatered soil. At night, she would lie in bed listening to her breath, slow and thick, faintly scented of earth and crushed leaves. The air around her seemed heavier now, sweet with rot and pollen, as if the greenhouse were breathing through her.

The colours appeared brighter—painfully so. The world outside the greenhouse blurred, irrelevant. She stopped going to meals. She snuck out at night, curling beneath the glass like a petal folding into itself.

Teachers commented on her silence. Her roommate moved out.

She returned to the journal. Chloris had warned of "pruning" — that when the school noticed what was growing, they would try to cut it back. She hinted at other girls who disappeared among the vines after too much time, who came back quiet and empty-eyed — if they came back at all. But if you rooted deep enough, you could stay. You could bloom forever.

Wren unlocked the door to the forbidden wing with a rusted key hidden in the journal's spine. Her fingers trembled. The metal was cold, and she could feel the weight of something watching as the lock gave way.

Inside, the air was still. Pollen hung like dust. Vines grew thick along the walls, framing glass jars lined in rows. Each jar held a cutting. Each cutting bore a label.

One read: Chloris, 1961.

Another: Aurelia, 1983.

The last jar in the row was empty. Its label was blank. Wren leaned in. Her breath caught. A chill ran down her spine, not from fear, but recognition — as if something inside her had always known this space was waiting for her. She reached out, but stopped just short of touching the glass.

Wren smiled. A memory stirred — her mother's voice saying, 'Some things bloom only in the dark.'

That night, she lay in the soft bed beneath the bench. She folded her arms. Her breath slowed. Her heartbeat softened to something vegetal. The soil around her rose like a cradle. She closed her eyes.

She was becoming.

---

When the term resumed, the students returned to find the greenhouse locked. But from outside, some swore they saw movement through the fogged glass. Her name, once forgotten, began to reappear in whispers, carved into desk wood, murmured in hallways.

A vine twisting up the pane.

A shadow that blinked.

A girl with moss for hair and soil for eyes, watching them back. And behind the glass, she slept — still and patient in her root-sleep.