3.19, or:

It happened in slow-motion and on fast-forward.

The previous floor setting like the sun, giving new light, reluctantly, mechanically, to the coming floor and the coming day. The dawn spreading out wide on the cracked, prefabricated linoleum landing with rays of florescent sunlight thrown brown across the walls like the halls with their faux wood paneling.

The metal grating began its scissoring dance from left to right and the gap between them widened for an instant but an eternity.

He stepped across that divide and with him when her hand still seemingly attached to her shoulder and her torso. Her hand in the form of a fist left her then and sailed away from her like Sputnik might have so long ago. He balled-up fingers also had a mission and they, too, were under the influence of zero-gravity.

His bulking back, already sweating from the humid early summer morning, was framed by all the ugly and the brown of the failing Soviet state. The hallway was crumbling and the lift was merely the portal to the life were meant to share together. The rows of doors gave perspective to not just his walking away, his deployment from the lift, but her angry fist following suit. And it landed, with all the might and pent-up frustration that she could summon at that moment based upon their first two years of marriage.

There in that hallway she became the abuser.

***

No unhappy marriage unravels in an instant. When Elena thought about the previous 'scene', however, she couldn't help but see, in hindsight, the beginning of the end.

She had taken him to see her adopted country in 2011. That was four years after she'd already studied there and two years since they'd wed, secretly, out of respect for her on-again, off-again relationship with Catholicism. To wit, they had wed, secretly, more out of her guilt as much as her inability to tell him, "NO! THIS IS A TERRIBLE IDEA!"

Elena forgot to mention, as she often does, that he had proposed over Skype.

Doomed to fail in one lift between the dining room floor and their apartment seemed too much an obvious conclusion in retrospect.

But back to that morning. They dined, no, rather, they gorged, on pampushky like a bunch of field-hungry Cossacks just like they had the previous three mornings. He being too afraid to eat in the market or to venture beyond the confines of Kiev. Well, without her, anyway.

Elena had been left to fend for herself every single night of their stay since, as she well knew, nothing good really does happen in the capital after dark. Really. He seemed unswayed and so would leave her to watch the television and fall asleep to the sounds of police sirens seven floors below.

She didn't mind. This was their new routine. Out of two years of marriage they had only been stationed together half of that time. What else did one expect? They needed rest and he took to sleeping in another bed and then another room, which wasn't wildly unfamiliar to her as Elena's own parents had had this sort of arrangement for years. And her mother's parents before them.

She boiled over that fourth morning, though, because it had become crystal clear to Elena that his life was her life. He did not want to work. He did not want to pursue higher education. He did not want to become a career diplomat as she did. He did not even want to promote. He wanted comfort and on her dime.

And thus, with his back to her, and his gait pulling him past the rows of doors on the semov etajay she cracked. She buckled like the apartment walls in which they reposed. She hit him to hit her. She was the stupid one. The fool.

She was sorry.