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apologizes, and I can tell he really feels bad. Either that or he is pretending to feel bad to fool
Emily.

We all sit down, the children included, and there is an awkward silence that passes by until Lynne
suggests that we play a game. She goes into the kids' room and then comes out with some board
game I had never seen before, but it would be the new instrument that helped us kill time. Emily
says she is too tired to play anything and that she was going to go lay down in the bedroom, so it's
just Lynne and her two kids and I.

Throughout the game, while having a decent time with these people, I continue to think about
Silvio and how he might split them apart. How he might do something to make every thing that is
so right now so wrong later.

David and Sarah eventually fall asleep where they sit and only Lynne and I are awake in the
apartment. Maybe in the entire building. Maybe not, I think Boris works a graveyard shift. Lynne
gets up to go use the bathroom, and maybe six or seven seconds later I get up to look out the
window to see how full that big white dot is. Before I can find the big white dot something else
catches my eye. Far into the distance, way down the road in the middle of the road an entire tree
has fallen from its roots. The entire tree has fallen across the street, from sidewalk to sidewalk, but
has miraculously missed all of the cars. That's how it looks from here anyway. When Lynne gets
out of the bathroom I tell her to come look at it and she says it's nothing she's ever seen before, that
she wants to take a closer look.

Curiosity must be one of the oldest behaviors of humankind. Not too long ago, where I was staying
then, I had an entire wall full of diagrams of what could possibly be beyond our universe. My
curiosity for things surrounding the human condition was so severe that I let it get the best of me.
Maybe I have changed, and maybe if I go back there again someday to the time where my mind
was eaten up by fiction, I could do better, but then again the behaviors and instincts of people
rarely change.

According to theories, things like fear, curiosity, self-preservation and conflict have been around
since before the beginning of man and have not changed in the least. New people are born but the
behaviors never die.

Lynne and I get into her car and she drives towards the fallen tree, the streets are completely empty
from pedestrians. I ask her why we are driving such a short distance when we could have walked it,
and she says because she would like to drive around and see what else the short but powerful storm
did.

When we get to the tree, it's even more bizarre than we expected. We get out of the car and see how
the root of the tree just completely exploded. I start to wonder how many red blood cells this tree is
going to stop from doing their work.

After looking at the tree, we get back into the car and drive around for a bit, and we come to realize
there are fallen trees throughout the town, and even more than that, many branches laying on the
sidewalks. Some parts of the town are so dark because the street lights have no power. If I didn't