The Grocery Store

When Maria entered the supermarket, she noticed immediately that the music had opinions about her. Not the lyrics—the music itself. The saxophone in the overhead jazz was disappointed in her choices. The drums knew about the email she hadn't answered.

She took a basket. The basket was heavier than other people's baskets. She was sure of this.

In produce, she picked up a tomato. It was too red. Aggressively red. The tomato was making a statement she wasn't prepared to engage with.

She put it back.

The next tomato was somehow worse. This one was trying to look normal, which was its own kind of aggression.

A man reached past her for an avocado. He didn't say "excuse me." He didn't have to. His presence said everything. His presence said: I am a person who reaches for avocados without hesitation. I have never once questioned whether an avocado wanted to be touched by me.

Maria envied him. She feared him. She moved to canned goods.

The fluorescent lights in aisle seven were having a meeting about her. She couldn't hear what they were saying but she could feel the consensus building.

She needed rice. She stood in front of the rice for eleven minutes. There were too many kinds of rice. Each kind of rice represented a different life she could be living. Jasmine rice Maria was not the same person as Arborio rice Maria. The decision felt enormous. The decision was enormous.

A child screamed somewhere in the store. The scream entered Maria's body and stayed there, rearranging her internal organs slightly.

She abandoned her basket near the organic lentils.

In the parking lot, she sat in her car for forty-five minutes, listening to nothing, being nothing, recovering from the fluorescent lights and the saxophone and the red tomato and the man who touched avocados like it was simple.

"Paper or plastic?" the cashier had asked, seventeen hours ago, in another life, to a different Maria.

"I need to think about it," Maria had said, or would have said, or was always saying, somewhere, forever. "I need to think about everything."

The engine started. The car drove home. Maria was technically inside it.