Mother never spoke.

At least not from my earliest self-awareness.

I always felt her love, though.

Living amongst the scorpions and rattlers and havelinas on the boiling mountain sands

of the Sonoran desert, I understood this to be normal, the lack of words.

Well, normal is a descriptor that is open to interpretation, but from the age of three until

my forties, the only living being I had ever known that shared our apex status on the

food chain was mother. This isn't ad homonym or exaggerating for effect. No other soul was around.

Not once in my decades in the wild did I see another advanced living creature aside from Mother.

Thus, this solitude was normal to me.

It was all I knew life to be.

Mother never spoke, but I did.

We communicated non-verbally, and that was all I needed to know that I was loved.

I learned English from an old RCA radio that never seemed to run out of batteries.

We never seemed to run out of anything.

We never left our acre or our hut itself molded from the deathly nature that blanketed us, yet the day's

needs would simply appear come dawn.

I never questioned how the game that provided our meat was sourced, or where things like

clothing or other basics derived.

Again, I only knew what life had shown me, and the vision never

extended beyond our lonely wasteland. I belonged to Mother, ando's.

I'm Darren Marler and this is Weird Darkness.

...