Later I was told that it hadn’t mattered, no matter what, they were goners. I am not sure if the woman said it because she believed it, or because it was true, or just to fill the uncomfortable silence as I looked at the waste.

Maybe if I had not reacted so hastily, maybe if I had thought it through, there would not be so many questions. Perhaps that is the truest of human conditions, we just never know. What if I had asked her to dance? What if I had taken art class? What if I had left the corpses where they lay? Could the reason for this tragedy be better understood? Would we have an answer? One thing’s for sure; if I had listened to my wife this would never have happened. Then again, I'd listened to her before and got married.

Explosions are about energy and stress: if there is enough energy, the container will be stressed to failure and it will crack, maybe explode. It all depends on the amount of energy, and the ability of the container to contain that energy. Sometimes the container is flawed; a small scratch on the surface that leads to catastrophic failure, or a small imperfection or inclusion within the microscopic structure of the material that makes up the container weakens the entire structure. Sometimes, the energy is just too much, unexpected, or at least outside of tolerance. Whatever, the equation becomes unbalanced, the situation unstable, and failure probable. Just like people.

This wasn’t what my life was about. My life is about controlled research; each subject in the correct group, correctly labeled and intensely scrutinized. I am just a regular Joe, this kind of messiness was not for me. Not for a regular guy, just going out to find a screwdriver.