There wasn’t any music in my car on the drive home from Wherever. I rattled along on the highway and could only hear crushing waves of vehicles blasting by my own. I stared at the red lights ahead of me until my eyes cracked.

I left the highway and steered my dreadnought in the direction of “home”. I parked and sat there for a long while. Eventually, I called my father.

I asked him for help.

It was the first time this had happened in many years. He seemed surprised and honored and saddened to hear from me. There was a tremendous amount of emotion in his terse sentences; he felt a lot all at once. I said I felt nothing. He seemed to understand this.

I told him, pointing, though he couldn’t see, that I was sick of my neighbors and their enormous television. Their living room flashed in dead bursts of radiation. It made me sick. “Look!” I thought, still pointing, still just a voice on the other end of the phone. “Look at how disgusting all of this is!”

I told him that they never turned it off; they watched television, as far as I knew, every hour of every day.

Though I didn’t mention this, I thought about it: the first night they moved in, I welcomed them to the neighborhood. I said, “Welcome!” and a few other words that were appropriate and friendly. They stared at me with ice-bucket-cold hatred. My voice trailed off. They stepped inside and watched television.

Is this what it’s all about?, I wondered to my father, who seemed subdued by my melancholy. He replied with brilliant words. I felt a single, tremendous beat of the organ in my chest; it reverberated off of everything in between me and space. There was a lot of empty room in there; I was, after all, hollow.

And am I now just as well, I wonder!

I said good-bye and ended the conversation when I’d been adequately filled with energy. I hung up when I felt like I were able to blink again.

When I stepped inside the house, I bent over to keep a little friend of mine from running out the door. My head grazed the door frame. I felt a tiny slice creep across my head like a laser beam. I put an open palm on my swirling-sleepy head and brought it close to my eyes, which were beginning to blur and quiver with hollowness. My hand was covered in blood. I rinsed the gory mess from my hair and felt nothing.