Rio looked at the antelope leg blankly. It was untouched. The female simply wasn’t hungry. Lume had come back this morning sporting crocodile bites on his legs. She had gotten into another fight with him, their hot tempers escalating until Lume had jogged off. Rio wasn’t worried about whether or not he would come back. Lume always did. They would argue, the young male would run off and do whatever he needed to calm down, and then he was back within a day or two and life moved on. What the leopardess was worried about was the fact that she and Lume had been arguing so much more lately. It was becoming a weekly thing. And most recently they had not been able to go two or three days without bickering to some degree. It was stressful to Rio, and more importantly, it was stressful to Pinta. The female looked up at her daughter, gnawing on the other leg of the antelope. Pinta and Lume were close. Lume and Rio’s outbursts always made Pinta a little withdrawn and sad. The knowledge that Rio was hurting her daughter was not comforting in the slightest. Rio sighed and pushed the food away, not in the mood to eat.
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Pinta stopped and looked up at her mother’s movements, instantly losing her appetite. It had been like this recently, the air always heavy with sadness and tension. Pinta wanted nothing more than to do something that would help, but she didn’t know what. There didn’t seem to be a thing in the world that could stop her mother and Lume from arguing once they really go into it. And every single time, it left them all like this. The young female’s shoulders drooped. Sometimes she felt useless. She would never be the dancer that Rio and Lume were, and Pinta always felt in the way when arguments started. “It wasn’t your fault, you know.” Pinta said, trying to console her mother. “You know how Lume can get! He just needs a little time like he always does.” Every family went through a rough patch, right? This was probably theirs. Pinta was sure that give or take a few weeks, they’d be back to all smiles and dances under the starlight.
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Rio shook her head. “No, hija, I am not worried about his absence itself. I am worried about the frequency of them.” The dancer sighed. “More and more I am feeling like I cannot get through to him. He is becoming distant from me and I do not know why.” She lamented. They had been close, once, when Lume was younger. He had been a little reckless and fast-paced since birth, but it had always been channeled in healthy ways. Playing with his siblings, dancing, exploring the world around him, it used up the tremendous amount of energy the boy had. But Lume was dancing less and less and resorting to going on his dangerous outings more and more. Crocodile bites! He could have died. He could have lost a limb or drowned and Rio would have never known what had happened to him. No, it was not the time to be reviewing an old argument. What had been done was done. Rio needed to start thinking of way to bridge the gap that had grown between her and her son.
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Pinta frowned. Her mother was right. Lume had been gone a lot more, and had been engaging in increasingly dangerous stunts. Pinta had always assumed the Lume could handle himself until she’d seen the wounds from this morning. Pinta had almost wanted to comment on them herself. She nearly did, too, before her mother had gone off and begun the fight. “Maybe he’s just restless. It can’t be easy traveling around with your mother and sister all the time.” Heck, it wasn’t easy traveling with just your mother. The young female shrugged. “He probably just feels like he needs to spend more time away. Young male in his prime? I’m sure it’s natural. Just let him do his thing.” Pinta suggested.
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Rio clucked her tongue angrily. “His thing? His thing. Ay, his thing, Pinta, is jumping into rivers full of crocodile. His thing his trying to get squashed by elephants or run over by rhinos. His thing is picking fights because he is bored!” She growled. Unable to contain her anger in a seated position, Rio rose to her feet and began pacing back and forth in a tight line. “Lovers I can deal with. He is his own man. But when my own son purposefully puts himself into harm’s way, then I cannot be letting him do his thing.” The dancer stamped a foot on the ground for emphasis. Who was crazy enough go off and get themselves hurt anyways? Who wanted to put themselves in the hands of fate and tempt the gods?
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Pinta scowled at her mother. “And you shouldn’t be doing that either. Yelling at him. He’s obviously working through some stuff, trying to find his own person, and every time he comes back you blow up.” The leopardess put her ears back and shuffled her paws. “I know you love us, and that when you get angry you’re just worried about us, but it doesn’t always feel that way, you know?” Pinta admitted. It wasn’t often that Rio yelled at her, and when she did it was usually because Pinta had done something stupid and gotten hurt, like the time she tried to do a complex spin move and ended up spraining her paw. Rio’s ranting lecture following the incident had been triggered by love, but it had made Pinta feel terrible. She could only imagine that Lume felt the same way.
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She stopped in her tracks, looking back at her daughter. She looked so downcast, so lost, so very much like the little cub that she used to be that Rio’s heart melted. Rio rushed over to her daughter and sat down next to her, paw on Pinta’s shoulders. “Oh hija, I am sorry. You are right. I will try harder to be more calm. Like you, hm?” Rio used her other paw to lift Pinta’s chin up so that they were looking at each other properly. “So poised and collected, bonita. You certainly did not get that from me, I am telling you this.” Rio smiled when Pinta huffed a laugh. “Come now. Why don’t you sing for me while I eat. You know I love to hear your voice.” The mother’s chest swelled at the happy light in her daughter’s eyes. Pinta was right. It was not easy, being a part of their family, but Rio knew deep down that eventually they would be alright. If only someone could tell her son that.
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