And now, as Lena pried, the tub was not lifting. The floor was lifting with it.
Nothing.
She braced her feet against the wall, gripped the tub’s rim, and heaved. bathtub stuck
The New Yorker wrote a profile titled “The Bathtub That Ate the Bathroom.” A structural engineer offered to fix the floor for free in exchange for naming rights to the show. Lena declined. She’d grown fond of the arrangement. And now, as Lena pried, the tub was not lifting
Over the next week, Lena tried everything. A sledgehammer only chipped the enamel. A heat gun turned the epoxy into a kind of superglue-scented napalm. A contractor named Jerry came by, took one look, laughed for thirty seconds straight, and quoted her nine thousand dollars to “cut out the floor, lift the tub with a chain hoist, and rebuild the joists from scratch.” Lena didn’t have nine thousand dollars. She had a bathtub that was now load-bearing. She braced her feet against the wall, gripped
The tub never moved again. But every Sunday, Lena filled it with warm water and a splash of eucalyptus oil, climbed the ladder, and soaked while looking down at her living room. From that angle, the ceiling fan looked like a slow-motion helicopter. The goldfish drifted past her knees. And somewhere deep in the floorboards, Horace’s ghost—if it existed—probably laughed.