“Errand Run (Sad Girl Summer)” is a short story written in Twine by Sophia Zhao. Ought to be played before reading my analysis.
Spoilers
For the first thirty seconds I took this at face value, a single woman grocery shopping in a pretty crappy grocery store. I like food stories, so I played on. The twist became apparent fairly quickly, that I was shopping in some post apocalyptic nightmare world. The vividly written text and creative CSS styling work together to create that mood. For the next thirty seconds, I thought it was set after a war. Then in the last thirty seconds I realized that it was more literally post apocalyptic, in the religious sense, set after the Rapture. This is timely, since the rapture happened last week, I’ve been told. Nobody I know was taken up. But that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. It just didn’t happen to any of my friends. “It’s the end of the world every day, for someone” Margaret Atwood tells us in the end quote, leaving me with a fourth possible interpretation of Sophia Zhao’s provocative art piece.