THE BOTTLE IN THE RIVER

"Oi, lelet. Move faster, retard, or I'll dock your pay myself."

Bara didn't look up. He never looked up when Reza said things like that — looking up just gave Reza something to aim at. He kept his eyes on the stack of instant noodle cartons, counted the edges with his fingers the way he always did, twelve on this side, twelve on that side, before he lifted.

"Did you hear me?" Reza kicked the bottom carton, just enough to make the whole stack shudder. Bara's hands shot out to steady it, and that was the mistake, because now his hands were shaking, and Reza saw it, and Reza smiled the way he always smiled when he found a nerve.

"Look at him. Shaking like he's about to cry." Reza turned to the other warehouse boys, Yudi and Fikri, who were pretending to check inventory sheets they weren't reading. "Every day like this. You'd think after two years he'd learn to just talk like a normal person."

"I'm working," Bara said. His voice came out flatter than he wanted, too even, no rise or fall in it, and he hated that, hated that even his voice betrayed him as different.

"I'm working," Reza mimicked, pitch-perfect and cruel. Yudi laughed before he could stop himself, then looked guilty and pretended to cough instead.

Bara lifted the top carton and carried it toward the storage shelf, counting his steps because counting kept the noise in his chest from climbing up into his throat. Seven, eight, nine. Behind him he heard Reza mutter something to Fikri — he caught only fragments, "...garbage worker..." and "...surprised his own mother doesn't dump him too" — and something in his stomach folded in on itself like paper.

He set the carton down. His hands were steady again. Good.

"Bara!" That was Pak Hendra's voice, sharp, coming from the front of the store. "Customer's waiting on the rice deliveries. Where are they?"

"Coming, Pak." He hadn't moved a single bag of rice yet — he'd been told to finish the noodles first, by Reza, twenty minutes ago, precisely so this would happen.

He walked out front anyway, because arguing never worked, arguing only ever sounded like excuses in his mouth, clumsy and too honest, and honesty always made things worse. Pak Hendra's face when he saw the empty space where the rice should be told Bara everything he needed to know about how this day was going to end.

"I told Reza an hour ago," Pak Hendra snapped. "What have you been doing back there?"

"Reza told me to do the noodles first—"

"I don't want excuses, I want rice bags at the front counter in five minutes." Pak Hendra was already walking away, already not listening, the way people stopped listening to him the second his sentences got complicated enough to require patience.

Bara stood there for a second too long. Nobody in this store had ever, not once, asked him to finish a sentence.

"You always find a way to ruin it, don't you?"

Reza said this leaning against the rice sacks Bara had just spent forty minutes hauling from the back, arms crossed, watching Bara sweat through his shirt in the afternoon heat.

"I was told to do noodles first." Bara's jaw was tight. He kept stacking, kept his eyes on the burlap, kept counting — this one's forty kilos, that one's forty, this one feels off, maybe thirty-eight.

"I never told you that." Reza's voice went loud on purpose, loud enough to carry to the register where two customers were standing. "I said get the rice and then the noodles. You always mishear things. It's kind of your whole thing."

A customer glanced over. Bara felt the look land on him like a hand pressing down on the back of his neck.

"That's not—" he started, and stopped, because his mouth had already tangled the words up, and starting over would just make him sound guiltier.

"See, this is what I mean," Reza said to Fikri, delighted, performing now. "You can't even finish defending yourself. It's actually kind of sad."

Something happened in Bara's chest that he didn't have a name for — not quite anger, because anger implied he thought he had a right to be angry, and some small collapsed part of him still wasn't sure he did. It was closer to drowning. A tightness that climbed from his stomach to his throat and stopped there, refusing to become words.

"Leave him alone," said a voice from the shelf aisle — Sari, one of the cashiers, the only person in the store who'd ever said his name without a sneer folded into it. "He does more work than you and Fikri combined and you know it."

"Relax, Sari, we're just messing with the guy." Reza's grin didn't move. "He knows we're just messing with him. Right, Bara?"

Bara said nothing. Saying nothing was the only version of this conversation where he didn't lose.

That night he walked home along the river path instead of the main road, because the main road had people on it, and people looked at him, and tonight he didn't have the muscle left in his face to arrange itself into something that wouldn't invite more comments. The river was low and brown and smelled like rain that hadn't come yet. He didn't stop. He just walked, listening to his own shoes on the gravel, counting them without meaning to. Left, right, left. It was the only conversation that never turned on him.

"Where's the rest of the stock, Bara? Don't play dumb with me."

Pak Hendra's voice cracked through the warehouse like a slammed door. Bara turned around holding the clipboard he'd been using to count the incoming shipment, genuinely confused, because as far as he knew, everything had been logged correctly.

"What's missing, Sir?"

"Two boxes of imported milk powder. Expensive stock. Gone." Pak Hendra's face was red in the particular way it went red before he started shouting properly. "You were the last one in the storeroom last night."

"I logged everything before I left. I can show you the sheet—"