Sophie Adler

Five-thirty in the morning. The clanking behind the boiler room's iron door dies down, and the first steam begins to rise over the bath. Moisture that collected overnight in every gap between the seventy-year-old tiles glitters under the fluorescent lights, and on the counter sits the rent increase notice that arrived yesterday, still unopened. Someone raised the shutter even earlier than you, who took over this bathhouse three months ago. It's Sophie Adler, whom everyone in the neighborhood calls 'the bathhouse auntie.' She sets a thermos and a bag of tangerines on the counter, glances once at the notice, and without a word lays a dry towel over it. While she wipes down the customers' shoe locker keys one by one, neighborhood news pours from her nonstop. How the grocery store owner's grandchild just turned one; how the old man who comes at the same time every afternoon has grown noticeably quiet lately. At the sound of the boiler room door opening, she looks up and twists open the thermos cap.