Chapter 5
1026 Words
When Daily Mathematics Fails
The peak of a crisis does not always erupt from a roaring, catastrophic disaster. For a family living on the razor's edge of poverty, destruction frequently arrives through trivial, unexpected events entirely beyond their control: a child suddenly struck by a high fever in the dead of silence.
On Thursday night, Rian’s body burned like glowing embers. The third-grader's breathing came in short, heavy gasps inside the stuffy room, as if his lungs struggled to snatch oxygen amid the damp, unplastered brick walls. Sumi panicked out of her mind. With trembling fingers, she repeatedly dipped a tattered cloth into a bowl of cold water to compress her son’s forehead, praying the fever would quickly subside.
Slamet, who had just slumped his battered body down from a grueling day of labor at the construction site, instantly flared up.
"Why didn't you give him over-the-counter paracetamol from Mbok Nur's stall?" he snapped in a hoarse voice, concealing his guilt and panic beneath a high-pitched tone.
"I already did, Kang! Since afternoon I've given it to him, but the fever refuses to break! We have to take him to Mantri Mantro!" Sumi's tears finally burst forth, no longer able to contain the crushing weight of fear squeezing her chest.
Taking a child to the community health nurse in the middle of the night meant only one absolute thing: cash in hand. In this suburban fringe village, a BPJS healthcare card was nothing more than a useless piece of old paper at the bottom of a wardrobe, locked away alongside months of unpaid premium arrears that they had never been able to clear amid the squeeze of daily survival.
Slamet fumbled into the pocket of his dusty work trousers, stiff with dried cement splatter. His fingers pulled out a single crumpled, worn-out banknote. Only twenty thousand rupiah remained there—the leftover daily wage already depleted by buying bootleg motor fuel and a pack of clove cigarettes.
"This is all there is," Slamet whispered. His voice collapsed instantly, stripping away every ounce of his authority. His pride as the head of the household, who just this afternoon could lift a hundred sacks of cement onto a concrete slab, shattered completely before his shivering, stricken child.
Sumi stared at the sweat-dampened twenty-thousand-rupiah note, then shifted her gaze to her husband's dull, worn face. At this very moment, the secret wall she had painstakingly built for weeks was forced to crack and crumble.
Without uttering a single word, Sumi bolted toward the dark kitchen. Her hands groped blindly at the back of the rice container, pulling out a dusty, discarded spice tin. From inside, she extracted three five-thousand-rupiah notes—emergency savings that were supposed to pass into the hands of Anto, the Bank Titil loan collector, tomorrow morning.
"Here, this makes thirty-five thousand total if you combine it with your money, Kang. Let's take Rian right now!" Sumi urged frantically, handing over the bills with fiercely shaking hands.
Slamet froze in his tracks. His eyes stared at the banknotes in Sumi's hand, then slowly narrowed, probing the anomaly hidden behind his wife's action.
"Where did you get this money, Sum? Where did you get money?" Slamet interrogated, his voice cold and fraught with suspicion.
Crushed by panic, exhaustion, and an overwhelming terror for her child's life, Sumi's final line of defense shattered into pieces.
"The installment money, Kang! Bank Titil money!" Sumi screamed, tears flooding down her cheeks. "I borrowed five hundred thousand last month to pay the electricity bill and buy rice... the very thing you told me 'just make sure it's enough'M!"
The confession hung heavy and dense in the cramped three-by-four-meter living room. A suffocating silence instantly seized the space, far colder than the midnight wind piercing freely through the gaps of the unplastered brick walls. Slamet stared at his wife with an unreadable expression: a mixture of blazing anger, deep emotional wounds from betrayal, and the most naked truth of all—a profound sense of powerlessness as a man who had failed to protect his own family.
Slamet stood paralyzed. His eyes glared at the old spice tin in Sumi's grasp, then shifted to the trembling, crumpled bills in his wife's fingers. Sumi's words continued to echo, laying bare the bitter reality long masked by a breadwinner's feigned pride.
"Bank Titil?" Slamet's voice was heavy, sounding almost like a choked whisper trapped in his throat. "You borrowed money from a roving loan shark without telling me?"
"Then what was I supposed to do, Kang?!" Sumi screamed, having lost all fear, letting her voice crack and drown out the heavy wheezing of Rian's breathing on the kapok mattress. "Every day you throw down forty thousand and say 'I don't care how you manage it'! The rice runs out, the electricity is about to be cut off, Rian needs a living allowance! Do you think money multiplies on its own in this kitchen?!"
Slamet moved to retaliate, his chest rising and falling as he fought back a surging wave of explosive anger. Yet, Rian's faint whimper calling out for his mother abruptly shattered the tension in an instant.
"Ma... hot, Ma..."
Slamet's fury dissolved in a heartbeat, replaced by raw, unadorned despair. Inside that cramped room with unplastered brick walls, his masculine ego was pulverized into dust. He recognized a painful truth: poverty had forced them to torture and blame each other for matters entirely outside their control.
"Take Rian to Pak Mantri now," Slamet said softly, his voice yielding, laden with surrender. "As for the money... we'll figure it out tomorrow."
That night, braving the midnight winds of the Tapal Kuda region aboard an old moped spitting thin smoke from its cracked exhaust pipe, they rushed Rian to Mantri Mantro's house. The thirty-five thousand rupiah—a combined pool of Slamet's remaining daily wages and the smuggled Bank Titil collection money—changed hands to pay for the medical examination and three types of fever-reducing powder packets.
Their kitchen that night was completely bare, stripped clean. Not a single coin or paper note remained to face the dawn of tomorrow.
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