Short Story 'The Secret Lion' By Alberto Alvaro Rios

In the short story “The Secret Lion”, by Alberto Alvaro Rios, claims that innocence is something every kid once has and are afraid to face the real world, as their innocence will be taken away from them. In the short story, a young twelve-year-old boy and his friend are entering junior high school, which is like a whole new world to both of them, and everything like literally everything is changing for them. As they both do not want to grow up, and they are losing their innocence as they are finding out new things along the road. The new things that they are both finding out are things that they have never seen before. Not only are they finding out new things, but they are also losing things they never had before that once had. As the young

Each symbol has something to do with the young boy’s childhood as they do not want to lose anything in their past and want to keep everything they have forever. The narrator states “It was our river, though, our personal Mississippi, our friend from long back, and it was full of stories and all the branch forts we had built in it when we were still in Vikings of America, with our own symbol ” (181). They began to lose their innocence as they both are reminiscing their memories as they both had their own symbol and was full of stories. The Arroyo represents their freedom. The author writes: “we would yell this stuff over and over because it felt good, we couldn’t explain why, it just felt good and for the first time in our lives there was nobody to tell us we couldn’t. So we did” (181). The young boys were escaping from their new reality that they must grow up, so they were still acting like little kids. As when there are no adults around they can do what they want, without any rules. Furthermore, the grinding ball represents youth and innocence. The narrator states, “thisisthis is perfect, it’s round, round and heavy, it’sit’s the best thing we’veeverseen. Whatisit?” ” (181). The boys never knew something can be so “perfect” the object was “perfect” which was the grinding ball they found in the arroyo. Last but not least the golfing course represents finding out something they never knew before. The narrator states “Something got taken away from us that moment, Heaven. We grew up a little bit, and couldn’t go backward. We learned. No one had ever told us about golf. They had told us about heaven” (184). As they both thought the golfing course was heaven since they have only heard of heaven and never knew anything about golf. They misinterpret heaven as the golf course, only because they only knew about heaven. Overall, the