The tiny baby monkey clung to his mother’s side, his fragile fingers grasping her rough fur, desperate for comfort. His small face was streaked with tears, his cries soft but constant, echoing faintly through the thick jungle air. His body trembled with each sob, his chest rising and falling in uneven, shuddering breaths. Every now and then, his tiny fingers would tug gently at his mother’s arm, trying to pull her attention back to him, to remind her that he was there — that he needed her.
But the mother monkey sat still, her eyes staring somewhere far away, lost in the distance. Her arms hung limply at her sides, too tired to hold him close, too heavy with the weight of grief and hunger. Her own ribs showed faintly beneath her thinning fur, her body weak from the long struggle to find food and safety for them both. The baby’s cries were a whisper against the endless noise of the forest, too quiet to matter to the wind, to the trees, to anyone at all.
Still, he cried — not out of anger or frustration, but from something deeper, a sadness too large for such a tiny creature. He didn’t understand why she wouldn’t respond, why her arms didn’t wrap around him like they used to, why her soft grooming touch had faded into nothingness. He only knew that something was wrong, and that his heart ached in ways he couldn’t explain.
The mother monkey’s silence was louder than his cries, her stillness heavier than his trembling. And so the baby sat beside her, crying for her, crying for comfort, crying for a world too big and too cruel for such a small soul. And the forest, uncaring, carried his cries away into the endless sky.
