Which One (Short story)

[ScarletWrench]

She stood in the aisle for seven minutes.

The two brands of pasta sauce were identical in almost every respect. Same tomatoes. Similar ingredient lists. A 40-pence difference.

She had looked up reviews on her phone. She had compared the salt content. She had picked up each jar and put it back.

Behind her someone needed to get past.

'Sorry,' she said, and moved without choosing.

At home she made a different recipe entirely, one that used no sauce from a jar, that she had made a hundred times and never questioned. It was fine. It was always fine.

She could not explain why the jar had mattered so much at the time.

[Hollow85]

The specificity of seven minutes is what makes this land. Not a while, not a long time. Seven minutes standing in a supermarket aisle is a very precise portrait of a particular kind of paralysis

[DQ Eric]

Moved without choosing is the bravest decision in the story and the story knows it. The pasta sauce was never really about pasta sauce

[Lucky Dean]

The person who needed to get past is such a good detail. The outside world's indifference to the internal struggle

[BrightRunner]

At home she made something else entirely is the resolution the character needed and did not know they needed. The problem dissolved rather than being solved

[BankHolidayBlues87]

She could not explain why the jar had mattered so much at the time is the closing line that opens everything out. Anyone who has been paralysed by a small decision when larger things were unresolved will recognise exactly what that sentence is describing

[Cole75]

Keep it enough my friend