Dr. Malcolm Reyes leaned closer to the bloom, its sickly-sweet stench curling into his nostrils like a forgotten memory. The Titan arum, the infamous corpse flower, had unfurled its monstrous petals in the Sydney Botanical Gardens just hours ago, its rare event drawing crowds. But for Malcolm, this was personal.

He had studied these blooms his entire career, chasing their unpredictable cycles around the globe. Yet this one—this flower—seemed to call to him. Its velvety maroon folds shimmered under the greenhouse lights, and its towering spadix seemed to lean toward him as though recognizing an old friend.

Malcolm reached out, his fingers trembling, and brushed the edge of a petal. The stench intensified, and for a brief moment, the air around him rippled, bending like heat waves on asphalt. He blinked, and suddenly, he wasn’t in the greenhouse anymore.

He stood in a jungle, the air thick with humidity and the hum of cicadas. The corpse flower loomed before him, impossibly large, its petals curling like open arms. From its depths came a voice—familiar, yet alien.

“You’ve come back,” it said.

Malcolm stumbled backward, his boots sinking into the soft, loamy earth. “What is this?” he stammered.

The flower pulsed, its spadix glowing faintly. Images flooded his mind: a boy chasing fireflies in a jungle clearing, a woman’s laughter echoing through the trees, and the sound of a machete slicing through undergrowth.

“You left us,” the voice whispered, and Malcolm’s chest tightened. He remembered now—his childhood in Borneo, the family he had abandoned to pursue a life in science. He had buried those memories deep, like seeds in dark soil, hoping they’d never sprout.

The flower pulsed again, and Malcolm felt the weight of the machete in his hands. He saw his younger self, hacking through the jungle, desperate to escape the poverty, the expectations, the suffocating roots of his past. He had left them behind, left her behind—his mother, her hands rough from tending the earth, her voice singing him to sleep.

“Why now?” he whispered to the flower. “Why show me this?”

The petals quivered, releasing another wave of the cloying stench. “Life and death are cycles. You can’t escape the soil you grew from.”

Malcolm fell to his knees, the jungle dissolving into the sterile greenhouse around him. The corpse flower loomed above, its bloom beginning to wilt. The crowds outside had thinned, their interest fading as quickly as the flower’s scent.

He sat there for hours, watching the bloom collapse into itself, its brief moment of glory over. When he finally stood, his knees aching, he knew what he had to do.

The next flight to Borneo left at dawn. It was time to tend the roots he had once abandoned.