The first thing to disappear was the street sign outside Eli Carter's apartment.
He noticed it on a Tuesday morning—because Tuesdays were predictable, and missing things didn't belong in predictable days.
Eli paused at the front gate, backpack slung over one shoulder, sunlight flickering through the trees. The metal pole stood there as always, but the green sign at the top was gone.
Just… gone.
No rust marks. No broken bolts. Not even the faint outline of where it had once been.
He frowned and looked around. The neighboring signs were still there. Cars passed. A woman walked her dog. Everything else behaved exactly how it should.
Eli checked his phone.
Map app: working.
Location: buffering.
"Okay," he muttered. "Weird."
At school, he brought it up casually—because that's what you do when you don't want to sound crazy.
"Did you notice the sign on Alder Street is missing?" he asked his friend Jonah during homeroom.
Jonah blinked. "What sign?"
"The street sign. On the corner. We've walked past it every day since middle school."
Jonah laughed. "Bro, there's never been a sign there."
Eli felt the first crack of unease slide under his ribs.
By lunchtime, it got worse.
The empty desk.
Second row, near the window. Eli was sure someone used to sit there. A girl, maybe. Quiet. Always doodling in the margins of her notebook.
Now the desk was spotless, untouched, like it had never belonged to anyone.
"Who sat there?" Eli asked the teacher after class.
She looked at him like he'd asked the wrong question. "No one."
That afternoon, Eli passed a wall downtown where a mural used to be—a giant painting of the city skyline, glowing at night.
The wall was bare.
Clean.
Like it had been erased.
And suddenly, Eli understood something terrifying:
The city wasn't just losing things.
It was forgetting them.
And somehow—
He was one of the few who hadn't.