The Door of Unmade Choices: Chapter 4

CHAPTER 4 – Incident in Aisle 7

 

Grocery stores are liminal spaces by design. You go in as one person and come out as another, usually poorer after purchasing far more items than you intended. They offer the illusion of order amidst chaos with their stocked shelves, bright lighting, and familiar music. But I’ve always known better. Every person dutifully participating in rote consumerism in those aisles hides a story from the rest of the world. Maybe its one of regret or longing. Maybe it’s the story of how things just didn’t turn out the way the wanted.

Still, despite those conditions, I was surprised to find a door in the frozen juice aisle.

Frank and I arrived just after ten on a Thursday, when the store was busy enough to feel alive but not busy enough to feel supervised. The automatic doors signed open like wished they didn’t have to do this stupid job of opening and closing at the whims of others. Inside, a child was crying somewhere by cereal because there’s always a child crying in a grocery store. A man argued about a coupon. The freezer cases hummed with the confidence of machines who had embraced their purpose on this planet.

The door was in the middle of Aisle 7. Frozen breakfast items on one side, frozen juice on the other. It was plain, white, and industrial in construction. The kind one might expect to lead to a storage room or an employee-only area with a mop sink and a faint smell of cleaning products.

“Is this worse?” Frank asked. “It seems worse.”

“It’s public, so, yeah,” I said, walking around the door. “Doors are less volatile in private. Here, anything can happen.”

The store manager, a Nervous Nellie of a man named Evan, stood near the frozen croissant sandwiches clutching a walkie-talkie and reassuring curious shoppers that all was well and they should just move along. Evan was likely another man with a story; one where he isn’t a grocery store manager but a painter or a jazz musician.

“How long’s it been here?” I asked him.

“I…um…maybe ten minutes. Maybe longer. I thought it was a prank. Or some kind of testing from the higher ups. They like to test things.”

I glanced at the door. Paint had peeled away around the edges and the once bright metal handle was varnished with age.

“Did you open it?” I asked.

Evan hesitated and I took that as his answer. Frank shifted beside me, uneasy.

I pressed for more info. “What did you see?”

“I only cracked it a little,” Evan said. He stepped toward me and lowered his voice to hushed awe. “It was me. But…not here.”

His hands shook now, nearly causing him to drop the walkie-talkie. An assistant manager was now on hand to shoo people away with help from a bewildered stockperson. Evan shoved his hands into the pockets his company-assigned blue smock like he could trap his feelings there.

“I was in a kitchen,” he said. “One of those nice stainless steel ones where the pots hang over the counter. I was wearing a white chef’s outfit. Even the cool hat. I was making risotto.”

A chef. That’s Evan’s story. He wanted to be a chef. He continued.

“I cook. Well, I used to. I wanted to. Still…want to. I watch videos and cooking shows. Buy all the cookbooks. I practice at home all the time. It’s something I always wished I had tried. Pretty dumb, I guess.”

The door hummed, low and steady, like something was making its way from the other side. Frank noticed and took a step back.

“Oh, shit,” he whispered.

I shot him a quick glance as a way of telling him to keep calm. That’s when I saw it clearly. The way the door wasn’t just reacting to Evan, but resonating. It was borrowing energy somehow. Piggybacking on something bigger.

“This isn’t just your door,” I whispered to Frank. “It’s using you as a signal boost.”

Frank’s face fell so far I thought it might slide off his head and hit the floor.

“I didn’t mean to—”

“I know,” I said. “Most people don’t mean to start metaphysical chain reactions in grocery stores.”

“Silas.” Frank tugged on my sleeve. “It’s doing something. Is something gonna come out of there? A monster? Some kind of interdimensional door-to-door salesman?”

“Probably not this time,” I told him. “But interdimensional salesmen are a thing and they’re as annoying as they sound.”

The hum spiked. The door brightened, not visually, but emotionally, like it was waking up refreshed after a lovely nap.

“Frank,” I said. “I need you to back away. Slowly.”

He hesitated. “Why?”

“Because this door is not anchored here,” I said. “It’s anchored to you.”

Frank took three steps back toward the frozen potatoes. The hum softened. Another step. The door flickered. Frank back toward the end of the aisle, his breath shallow. The door shimmered and wavered, like a bulb trying to decide if it wanted to actually stay lit or just call it a day.

Then, just like that, the door vanished with a quiet “whomp.” Silence rushed to fill the gap. Stunned shoppers could only stare in quiet shock.

“What the hell just happened?” Evan asked me.

“Think of it like this,” I said. “Sometimes reality misfiles thing. A version of you ends up in the wrong drawer, gathering dust next another misplaced destiny. But every now and then, that drawer slides open. The universe, while looking for a pair of scissors or some batteries, discovers that version of you. And if you’re standing too close when it does, you start wondering whether the mistake was filing or the life you chose. And it usually happens in January.”

“I don’t understand anything you just said,” Evan said.

“That’s why I do what I do,” I said, walking past him. “While I’m here, I need to pick up some sausage biscuit sandwiches.”

 

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