Mallow Vines

I never should have asked.

It was the pink ones I was always curious about and my parents had nothing in my childhood in the way of answers. Not just for that but for a lot of things which I thought for a long time were the reason I fell off the rails. It wasn’t their fault. Just my own. I let the pink question go for years before I thought again of it after I’d managed to get myself into a grocery store without pressure again and I found myself just wandering the aisles without, for a change, an aim. Without having to worry about cash or time or responsibility you have the enviable achieved, you think beforehand, and afterwards you figure there’s still always a way to go. But I was liberated now to chase those things you want to when you’re younger and when the unfolding nature of the world is simple and not tangled.

So I went looking. First I referred to the back of the crinkling packaging and found no ingredients but instead a distributor whose phone number sent me to a subsidiary on their behalf and then through that receptionist to another whose interests in the confectionery were less clear. Muddling and muddling but that kind of persistent, confident access innate to you when you’ve already done something sort of like it before. And I could throw the promise of some cash around because I had the cash to throw around. I hoped I wouldn’t have to do it so soon. I got somewhere eventually with a regional associate that was part of the family business, I worked out, and they were looking for some sort of investment.

An office of that business was registered here for paperwork reasons but they lived overseas on the farms proper. I had to be pushy to get something like detail but I got it in the end as part of my firm commitment to seeing my business interests in the flesh. I didn’t know at the time that was a poor but accurate metaphor. They gave me mostly a loose description and told me they’d take my visit and take my money but that it was really up to me. Where they handwaved me towards wasn’t just a state but like a whole region.

On a map it was sparse and simple and I was sure that if I just hopped a plane and went I could ask around with a few greenback assets to make it all easier and I’d find it, and them, and maybe put my money where I said I would if the whole thing really had appeal. At some stage you have to take bets just because the static numbers aren’t as fun as the reports. The more concrete it all is the less you can enjoy it. I told them I’d see them out them. They said they were looking forward to having me out at the farm.

I was curious because I wasn’t aware that sugar grew in farms but I wasn’t getting directions to labs with food colouring. And pink marshmallows came out in a study recently as having much more iron and protein than their snow-coloured brethren. I was not, as they suspected later, some kind of government employee tasked with uncovering an import ring that sort of slipped under the radar. I was (am) just a curious adult blessed with success and so the freedom to chase the inane.

I got onboard and they checked my passport when I landed and all I had was carry-on and I said it was for business but fast and I’d be in and out in a week, maybe two, tops, and they bought it based on a loose itinerary and so inwards through Malaysia I proceeded. I was not continental, navigating Brunei where I needed to get towards the parts of the border that were still, even now, discrete.

Overland across that northern part of the island where the maps are guides more than representations, on foot and on bike both pedaled and motorised, where I had to pay out aplenty and often and more and more as word spread that I had it. And yet I got closer. References specific fading away to generalities and people more of a utility there than a value; flesh machines on the edge of slavery but conscious enough to want, and ask for, rewards beyond subsistence. Soon I saw folks with ghosts in their eyes and I knew if I wasn’t there yet I was close.

The collapsed caldera of a volcano gives way to greenery across the rim. Below the ridge becomes a maw-like spiral of white flowers like cotton upon tender vines thick the way through and beset with spines. Bodies move below me in layers like rice paddies but thin, razor sharp, and unforgiving Beyond it: a farmhouse stretching away on a wooden pier out into the sky from the caldera along the baked dirt path before me. I look towards it and the guide that’s gotten me here crosses his heart and lowers his head.

“Can you take me all the way?” I ask him.

“Too far already,” he says. “Too far already.” His hands grasp at my wrists for his money. I hand it over. Ahead, the shuffling shade of what might have been a man once approaches from the middle distance. I don’t like it. I turn and I retreat back down the way I came. I don’t go far and I don’t catch up to my guide and the cool of the rainforest returns some. The dirt path leads back below the canopy and in the loud stillness I can feel my heart beating fast and the climb up to the ridge feels like a bad idea but not so dangerous. I step off the track and into the jungle proper and it’s only as I get deeper and deeper, the way I came receding from me even if I wanted to go back early, that I realise I haven’t thought to ask about snakes. Instead on the plane I read history and political structures and economic stats and then fiction.

Through vines, across rocks, ripping apart moss and mosquitoes thick enough in the air to feel like I’m eating them as I climb. I go upwards slowly, maybe climbing a metre for every twenty I walk and I worry I’ll circle the thing but the breaking of the treeline against the rocky rim eventually gives away. I’m red, sore, tired, and covered in a tropical sweat that’s pulling salt to my skin. I peak my head out from the grasses, slap a fat insect to a red slime on my forearm, and step forward.

My head must appear fast over the caldera. I see him right there at the end. His last set of eyes, distant but full of life where his are far away and empty like a mug left on the sunburnt porch of a house someone’s died in without any notice.

“Hey,” I whisper, but I don’t realise as I say it that he’s already falling. His left foot slips sideways in his surprise. The heavy watering can he’s got flies out towards the abyss as he loses his balance and he doesn’t get it back.

He trips over a vine I can’t see and that he can’t see either I think. He is quiet, resigned, as he falls, this part of the country consigned to a Buddhist peace amongst the Islam all about them. He tumbles, sliced apart, parts of him arriving at the bottom at different times. I can’t hear anything at all.

The fallen farmer fades from human shape into something like an acid. He bubbles and liquefies and then shrinks and subsides and he’s drunk up by the vines like barflies put away schooners. There is no noise about all this. Birds and wind and the buzz of mosquitos in the heat. Then I can see it. That simple answer to a simple question more vicious than I expected and apparently the source of an accident. I ask about that later and they tell me it’s not always someone tripping.

Soft pink spiralling up the vines and the white sweet marshmallow flowers pinking like they’ve been dipped into paint. It comes up the caldera and even the thinnest of roots at my feet here at the top, where already even spikes like the thorns on a rose threaten the careless, small buds grow rapid in and push through the green membranes strong with iron and flesh and blood.

I’ve stood to watch stunned, struck, absorbed entirely. And too late I see in the distance, from the dirt path edge of the maw, the hollow old man I watched coming to me with a long finger pointed at me. Men already race faster than you’d believe along the ridge. I go back down the way I came, stumbling and racing, careful not to fall and stumble and run myself across an errant vine and spill apart here in the Bruneian wilderness, but they catch up nonetheless. Silence but for a heavy crack across the back of my head with some sort of stick. That’s what I figure later anyway.

I wake up later in the farmhouse with someone sitting on the other side of the table. Between us is, in order from them to me, a gun, my passport, a contract, and a pen. It takes me a while to get it together but I sort of understand it. I’m barely around but I get the idea. And the gun doesn’t come off the table as I read through it a bit fast but I get it. The numbers on the page are pretty big if you’re not looking to take everything. They’re pretty small if you were. So I just sign it because the gun’s polished but it’s not new. They wrap my wrists then with the thick green mallow vines dethorned and they pull them tight. They keep the contract and the gun. I get my passport and the pen and an escort all the way back down the mountain in silence to a seaplane with its engine running.

It’s not until later, landed back home, that I check the costs of the pink ones at the supermarket. The same cost as the regular stuff. I ask the importer about that like a year later when he arrives at my office without an appointment. He doesn’t want one. He wants a private soiree at my residence. I oblige him. There, he pays me out. He says there’s much more of it to come, in time.

Then he tells me they’re loss leaders. That people like them and buy them but not in huge volumes. It’s just a creative way to sell the stuff that would otherwise be discarded. The family have many other mountains filled with the same lethal vines that grow marshmallows in the dirt, white most of the time but red when there are surprises. By the scars on his face more than anything else, I choose to believe him.

I got word recently that he died. I don’t know for sure how but I had something like an idea when the store near me struggled to get marshmallows back in stock for a little longer than would make sense were they truly artificial.