So many options. Was she looking at varieties of possible beans and their brands, or possible futures? She wondered how, at one point in her long life, she hadn’t noticed the speckles in the tiled floor- how they served to remind her how meaningless her life was, merely a drop in a sea of eerily similar yet altogether different dots working together to create a questionable interior effect. The long aisle had an end in sight and yet was impossibly far away, her joints aching just thinking about the treacherous journey- maybe she was overthinking bean brands as a coping mechanism, projecting her fear of the future onto different kinds of beans… or maybe she just really liked beans. 

Would she take the ‘UnBEANlievably Good Pinto Beans’ or ‘Mr. Bean’s Best Black Beans?’ If she took the former, would she perhaps become a punner, a respected connoisseur of everything pun related? But if she took the latter, she could become one of the many fools who mistake celebrities’ paid promotions for honest recommendations. 

Would she buy the canned chickpeas, forever sealing her fate of becoming a health nut, enthusiastically declaring her zeal for all things vegetarian while enviously eying the steak at the next table over? 

Eying the black-eyed peas, she thought about how nifty it was that you could just buy luck in a bag- and she wondered why they weren’t constantly sold out. There must've been something wrong with them. 

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She remembered seeing a health guru declaring kidney beans the King of all beans- if she bought those, would she be declaring allegiance to them? Would she be prevented from eating all other types, purely because of a guilty conscience worried about something irrelevant? 

Would choosing great northern beans suggest allegiance to the North? Would choosing butter beans signal her desire to stay in the South? Would choosing either of those make the Midwest feel left out? As far as she was aware, the Midwest didn’t have a bean that simply screamed ‘Midwest.’ 

She heard a loud gasp, a cry of relief from behind her followed by anxious footsteps. 

“Ms. Lucy! Thank God you’re okay- you wandered off from the bus and we’ve been looking for hours!” A young woman chirped, hair still blonde and joints without aching.

Lucy hummed unresponsively. “Addie, darling, what would you like for dinner? I can’t quite decide. So many options- do you ever feel overwhelmed?” 

Addie frowned. “Oh, all the time, Ms. Lucy. But you don’t need to worry about that- Chef’s making mashed potatoes and pea soup!” 

“I think I want a fish dinner- what am I doing in the bean aisle? I don't even like beans,” Lucy said, sliding her frail hand into her pocket and searching for her wallet. “Addie, dear, it seems I don’t have my wallet. I think it was stolen.”

“It’s okay, Ms. Lucy. Why don’t you come with me, and we can find the culprit together?”

Lucy smiled kindly. “I’d like that, Addie. I really would.”