Arriving at their father's house, Jill and Jimmy notice that the house is empty. The same “emptiness” is on the street: not a single person, not a single car. Where is everyone? Where did their father go? What if they are the only living people in the whole wide world? Wolfe's story was inspired by watching television with the sound off, Wolfe said. “I usually mute the commercials and often mute the show,” he said. "Sometimes it's interesting to try to understand what's going on, and it gets me out of the canned laughter of sitcoms." When writing "Mute," Wolfe drew heavily from his own childhood, he said. “People today almost never leave young children alone in the house,” he said. “In my childhood, everything was different. My father was absent from home almost every week from Monday morning to Friday evening - he was a traveling salesman and traveled by car around a huge territory - Texas, Oklahoma and Louisiana. We had no relatives in Texas. Mom often left me alone in the house for half a day or more while I went shopping, to the dentist, or somewhere else. On weekends, my parents played bridge at the house of another bridge-playing couple; by the time they returned, I was often in bed and asleep."