She tried again, this time with a grunt. The tub shifted an inch, then stopped. Lena frowned, got a crowbar, and worked it under one of the feet. The foot lifted half an inch—and then something deep in the floorboards groaned, a sound like an old ship settling into its grave.
She braced her feet against the wall, gripped the tub’s rim, and heaved. bathtub stuck
A crack spiderwebbed across the bathroom tiles. Then another. The entire floor—a six-foot-by-eight-foot chunk of plywood, linoleum, and rot—began to tilt like a seesaw. Lena yelped and scrambled backward into the hallway. The tub, still stubbornly attached, rose two inches, three, then settled at a drunken angle, one claw still gripping the concrete like a stubborn cat on a screen door. She tried again, this time with a grunt
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. The foot lifted half an inch—and then something
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.
She froze. “No,” she whispered.
And now, as Lena pried, the tub was not lifting. The floor was lifting with it.