Elsewhere
In this work of creative nonfiction, Jeffrey-Michael Kane explores an abandoned apartment and the artifacts we leave behind.
Before I lived there, I was told the previous tenants had left suddenly. No one explained why. The apartment felt recently unsettled, as if its patterns had been interrupted but not yet erased. I learned the place not through what was present, but through what had stopped.
The weight arrived at 6:14. Always 6:14. Ceramic, circular, heat spreading into grain. The pressure said: coffee, morning, the day beginning. Second weight at 6:31. Different hands. Lighter. Bowl, spoon, the small vibrations of eating. Rhythm: scrape, pause, scrape. Evening brought plates. Two sets. Forearms resting, elbows finding the same spots—left side worn smoother than the right. Papers rustling. Laptop heat. Pencil scratching. Sometimes laughter, a vibration through legs into floor. The table held weight. That was function.
—
Water at 6:47. Pressure began low, adjusted after twenty seconds. Temperature: 41°C. Breathing through spray—inhale, exhale, proof of body. Eight minutes. Water stop. At 7:12, the second body. Cooler. 38°C. Slower breathing. Eleven minutes. Two bodies, two temperatures, two rhythms. The shower knew them both by degree and duration.
—
Morning grip at 7:18: firm, rushed. Wetness, mint, ninety seconds. Second grip at 7:29: gentler, two minutes. The other toothbrush in the cup: parallel. Same direction. They never touched but were always paired. Two grips, two mouths, two drying cycles. The cup held them both.
—
The weight at 6:14. Water at 6:47. Grip at 7:18. Every day. The apartment measured itself this way—not in hours, but in coffee heat, in steam, in wetness and drying. Time was: this, then this, then this. Again tomorrow. Pattern without deviation.
Until the boots.
—
Boots. Not feet—boots. Weight that struck instead of stepped. Voices at wrong frequency, wrong rhythm. Doors opening, staying open. Cold air from the hallway, air that shouldn’t be inside. Hands on the table surface—wrong temperature, wrong pressure. Pressing down like searching. Papers scraped aside, not lifted. Something metal dragged across grain, leaving a line that hadn’t existed. Furniture in other rooms scraping floor. Sounds that didn’t belong to morning. The table lifted, tilted. Slammed back down. Voices louder. Then the two familiar weights, moving wrong. Not the morning shuffle to kitchen, not the evening return from door. Moving fast. Irregular. Then: gone. Door open. Staying open. Voices fading down the hallway. Silence that didn’t end.
6:14 came. The weight didn’t arrive.
Only daylight.
—
6:47. Water didn’t start. Through walls: other sounds. Shouting. Furniture scraping. A door slamming. Not this door—somewhere else in the building. The pipes rattled, pressure changing from other apartments. But here: nothing. No water. No breathing. Light through the window marked hours. Morning became afternoon. 18:12 came. The second body didn’t arrive. Evening. Night. The pipes stayed cold. Water waiting, unmoving.
—
Morning grip didn’t come either. The cup remained still. Light moved across the bathroom—the counter, the sink, the mirror. Hours measured by shadow. Evening grip didn’t come. Both toothbrushes dry. Both waiting. The cup undisturbed. Not bumped, not moved, not touched.
—
Day two. 7:14. No weight. The dust that always settled—that hands always cleared, that elbows always disturbed—stayed. Light moved across the table surface uninterrupted. No shadow from the mug. No papers moved. The scratch from the metal thing: still there. New.
6:47. Pipes cold. Other showers through walls still running. 6:30 next door. 7:15 upstairs. Water moving everywhere except here.
7:18. Bristles dry. Stiffening.
Day three. Same absence. The pattern hadn’t paused. It had broken.
—
Week one. Mail appeared under the door. Thin white rectangles sliding through the slot, landing on floor. No hands picked them up. Day four, day five, day six—more envelopes. Accumulating. The table measured time now by dust thickness. Mornings: light hitting the left edge at 6:42, moving across, gone by 9:18. No interruption. No shadows. No elbows clearing space. The wood settling differently without weight, without heat. Contracting. A fly landed, walked the length of the surface. This never happened when hands were here. The table held itself. Just mass, no purpose.
Through walls: other tables still holding coffee. Other mornings still arriving at 7:14. The pattern hadn’t broken everywhere. Only here.
—
Week one. Pipes cold. Water stagnant now—different density, different weight in the lines. Through the wall: shower running. 6:47. Steam seeping under the door from the neighbor’s bathroom, proving water still worked. Just not here. The breathing was gone. Even through the loudest spray, the shower had always heard breathing. That was proof—someone there, someone alive. Now: nothing proved anything.
—
Week one. Both toothbrushes dry. Bristles completely stiff. The cup exactly where it had been. Dust on the rim. Counter undisturbed. What if there were other toothbrushes now? Another bathroom, another cup, another pairing? Replacement wasn’t loss. Replacement was extinction.
—
Week three. More mail. Envelopes covering the floor now. A spider web between table leg and wall. Dust thick enough to write in. No one wrote in it. The grain drying without the oil from hands, from forearms. A crack forming in one corner—small, but growing. The table was changing without them. Wood adjusting to absence, becoming something else. A table no one used wasn’t quite a table.
—
Week three. Limescale forming on the showerhead. White crust where water once flowed daily. Tile grout darkening from the neighbor’s steam, no ventilation here to clear it. Through walls: still other showers. 6:30. 6:47. 7:15. Other breathing. Other bodies. The contrast—not emotion, just wrongness. Pattern-violation at a structural level.
—
Week three. Three weeks dry. Bristles rigid. The memory of wetness fading. Mouth-contact: the sensation becoming abstract. What if they were using toothbrushes? Just not us.
—
Week six. Mail stopped coming. Someone had noticed. Told someone to stop. That was worse. It meant someone knew they weren’t here. The apartment silent except for neighbors through walls. Defined by absence now—not what it held, but what it didn’t. The table’s wood cracking further. No weight to hold it together. Just persistence without function.
—
Week six. Pipes groaning at night from disuse, from cold. Other showers: still routine, still steam, still proof of life continuing. Just not here.
—
Week six. Both toothbrushes: purposeless objects in a cup. Bristles like wire. Drying complete. Permanent.
—
Dusk. Another one. The refrigerator stopped cycling. Nightlights stayed quiet. Electricity stopped humming in the walls.
—
Week eight. The table existed in negative space. Dust, cracks, spider webs. The coffee-spot still visible—a ghost-circle where heat had been.
Week eight. The shower: cold pipes, crusted fixtures, darkened grout.
Week eight. The toothbrushes: rigid in their cup, paired in abandonment.
Two months. The objects had stopped measuring time. Time measured them now—in dust depth, in limescale thickness, in the degree of drying.
Then: a key in the lock. Different key. Wrong sound, wrong rhythm. The door opened.
Not them.
—
Boots again. Different boots. Grey coveralls, name patches. Voices: assessing. “Whole apartment?” “Yeah, everything.” Cardboard boxes—new smell, glue and factory. Packing tape screaming off the roll. Footsteps in every room. Bathroom first.
A hand reached into the bathroom. Grabbed the cup. Both toothbrushes inside. Lifted. Tilted into a box. The box already contained shoes. A belt. Socks. Wrong things. The bristles pressed against shoe sole, against leather that had walked streets, carried weight, touched ground. Contact that meant nothing. The toothbrushes separated in the dark—one near the top of the box, one at the bottom. The pairing broken. Tape across the opening. Sealed. The mouth would never come again. Neither would wetness.
—
The shower was fixed to wall, to pipes. It heard other things leaving. Towels. Bathmat. Toilet brush. From the other room: furniture scraping. The mattresses—sound of springs groaning, resisting, dragged anyway. The shower would remain. Plumbing stayed. But everything that proved people had lived here: gone. New people would come eventually. New routine. New breathing. It knew the seasons. But those people—the ones whose temperature the shower had learned, whose breath it had measured—erased. As if they had never adjusted the pressure at twenty seconds. As if that exact temperature—41°C—had never meant anything.
—
Two men entered the kitchen. One on each side of the table. Lifted. The table’s legs stiffened—not choice, just physics. Weight rooting into floor. Didn’t matter. Tilted. Carried. Through the door. Down stairs, scraping the wall. The scratch from the metal thing still in the wood. Outside for the first time—daylight, cold air, world too big. The coffee-spot: ghost-circle, fading in the grain.
Van: white, no windows, nothing written on sides. Inside: dark. Other furniture already there. A chair. A lamp. Something soft, fabric. Springs groaned. Toothbrushes hushed. The table dropped—legs up, the world turned wrong side down.
Upstairs, the last of the men left. Door slammed. Lock turned. Outside air trapped inside.
Engine started. Motion.
Darkness. The chair pressed against the table’s left side. Something metal rattling nearby. The sound of glass wrapped in paper. The van moving through streets the table would never see. Away from the apartment. Away from 7:14. Toward a place that would hold different weight now, or no weight, or be empty forever.
The people: gone.
The apartment: gone.
Now: us.
The second disappearance, completing the first.
—
Memory kept up for a mile, and then stopped trying.
When I stepped into the empty rooms that day, the air still held the shape of the lives that had been taken from it. Their objects were long gone by then, but their absences remained—circles of dust, outlines on walls, a quiet that felt rehearsed. I stayed only a few minutes, long enough to understand that the apartment had already told me everything it could. The rest was elsewhere now.
I’d return tomorrow with new things.
J.M.C. Kane is the author of Quiet Brilliance: What Employers Miss About Neurodivergent Talent and How to See It (CollectiveInk U.K.), a celebrated nonfiction work on cognitive patterning and inclusion in the workplace He writes from this learned experience as an ASD-1. His prose work has been published in more than a dozen literary journals & magazine. He lives in New Orleans with his family in a house filled with paintings, dogs, and stories that unfold slowly.