I couldn't get it to where I liked it at 300 words and I didn't want to spend too much time on this, so here's two versions:

398 WORDS

I walked through my own life like a museum, running my fingers through the dust rising in the sunlight by my sides--my thumbs hung in my pockets. In the bedroom there were posters we had bought in college, mostly dingy, one-of-kind things for bands we'd never seen from other countries--a comic of two fish talking about a bar show in German. We framed them, still with tack holes from years before when they were just ironic, like trophies of things we'd thought of doing, but never could.

In the hall the dust went away with the sunlight, replaced by the sickly sweet smell of body wash and hot air. The smell of the old wooden baseboards together with the same shampoo she had been using for seven years covered my face and slid down the back of my throat to settle in my lungs. It should have made me sick, but not for the reason it did. Everything about the apartment seemed like a film I was shown, and loved, and had forgotten.

In the living room I stopped and studied the coffee table we had bought when we moved in. It was plain wood--square--bright wood I don't know the name of and stained darker, then dented and scratched in a thousand ways I'd never be able to tell you, like water shapes rock. And in the center of it was still a piece of glass, with her sitting silent in the kitchen, there it was, like a centerpiece for friends to stop by and see so that we could smile and tell them the story of the broken glass.

I walked to the space between kitchen and everywhere else and took balance on the door frame, with my hand low and the wood pressed against my skull, too meek to enter. She looked up at me, and then away and I took a breath so deep I thought to say something about it--some joke I would think of in the middle of saying it--but stopped myself.

"You don't love me anymore?" I asked, breathless in an irony.

She looked at me with an expression I would call emotionless if it weren't for her eyes--like tears should be forming, but couldn't find the space. She was so beautiful. Everything in my life was hers, I thought. Did I resent that?

She shook her head.

"Do you?" she asked.

297 WORDS

I walked through my own life like a museum, running my fingers through the dust rising in the sunlight by my sides--my thumbs hung in my pockets. In the bedroom there were posters we had bought in college, mostly dingy, one-of-kind things for bands we'd never seen from other countries--a comic of two fish talking about a bar show in German. We framed them, still with tack holes from years before, like trophies of things we'd thought of doing, but never could.

Everything about the apartment seemed like a film I was shown, and loved, and had forgotten.

In the living room I stopped and studied the coffee table we had bought when we moved in. It was plain wood--square--bright wood I don't know the name of and stained darker, then dented and scratched in a thousand ways I'd never be able to tell you. And in the center of it was still a piece of glass, with her sitting silent in the kitchen, there it was, like a centerpiece for friends to stop by and see so that we could smile and tell them the story of the broken glass.

I walked to the space between kitchen and everywhere else and took balance on the door frame. She looked up at me, and then away and I took a breath so deep I thought to say something about it--some joke I would think of in the middle of saying it--but stopped myself.

"You don't love me anymore?" I asked.

She looked at me with an expression I would call emotionless if it weren't for her eyes--like tears should be forming, but couldn't. She was so beautiful. Everything in my life was hers, I thought. Did I resent that?

She shook her head.

"Do you?" she asked.