Dare CCC

                                                            Blank Tape It was my first video party. My group of friends had been trying to get me to go to one for a long time, but I was never too good with crowds. On this particular evening, I had run out of excuses for why I couldn’t make it and found myself being dragged along. I couldn’t think of a worse way to spend my night than in a crowded room filled a bunch of strangers watching whatever garbage they could come up with, but there I was. As we approached the old dilapidated apartment building on the other side of town, I could feel a knot tightening in my stomach and I was already beginning to plan my exit strategy. The idea of a video party was that you were supposed to bring a videotape of something strange you had found and a big group of people would get together and watch them all. It was sort of like a Show and Tell, but much weirder. It could be anything ranging from a news broadcast that someone recorded right off

                            A Quiet Song I was so young at the time that I wasn’t able to understand what was happening. My Dad woke me up in the middle of the night to take me to the hospital, but I had always hated the hospital and cried the whole way. Usually, he hated it when I cried, but on that night, he stayed silent as he stared out at the empty road ahead of him. For some reason, that only made me want to cry louder. As we parked outside the tall grey building, I refused to get out of the car, but my Dad picked me up and carried me inside. His fingers dug into my skin to keep me from squirming and I tried to tell him that he was hurting me, but as I looked up at his face I realized that he had been crying too. We made our way through steel elevators and white hallways. It felt like we were walking through some kind of alien world. Finally, we stopped outside the door of one of the rooms. My Dad put me down and looked at me as though he was going say something, but only

A Room Full of Silence Throughout my life, I thought that I knew what loneliness was. I imagined loneliness as a sort of craving for human contact much like what you would get for a cold glass of whiskey after a long and brutal day at the office. It wasn’t until the day that I buried my Wife, and the silent wait spent sitting in the driver’s seat after saying goodbye to her for the last time, that I truly understood what loneliness was. It was not a craving, but the most painful hunger for something that you could never taste again, so instead the hunger eats away at you until there’s nothing left. There wasn’t anything in the whole world could satisfy it: only her. I returned back to our home—my home—in absolute silence. I paced through the rooms which still carried her scent and laid on the bed we shared together. I continued to lay there for hours and waited for something to happen. Her voice still echoed in my mind as I replayed hundreds of little conversations that never s