Aisle of Shame

A quarter to midnight. Nine things on the list. Everyone in the shop knows you.

Aisle of Shame is a social-stealth comedy set in one enormous late-night supermarket. You are not hiding from guards. You are hiding a shopping trolley from your mother, your ex, your boss and your dentist — and every one of them is delighted to run into you.

How it plays

You push a trolley down five double-sided aisles, taking profoundly embarrassing things off shelves: haemorrhoid cream, adult briefs, a pregnancy test, a romance novel called His Ranch, Her Rules. Every item you pick up sits in the basket in plain sight.

Then somebody walks over, and the conversation becomes the fight.

Composure drains while they talk — faster the closer they stand, faster still when their eyes drift down into the trolley. A wheel of timed replies comes up and you have four and a half seconds: deflect, change the subject, block their view with your body, lie about who the thing is for, or just admit it. Right answers buy distance. Wrong answers keep them there.

Run out of composure and you have a moment: the item is seen, named, and remembered. And they tell the others — so the next person you meet already knows.

Get to checkout 3 and Wanda reads every item aloud over the intercom, one at a time, with a price check on the worst of them.

Controls

W A S D	push the trolley
E	take the thing off the shelf
Q	bury it under the shopping
C	drape your coat over the basket
F	park the trolley where they cannot see it
R	shove it onto the wrong shelf and come back later
1 – 4	answer, while the clock runs

What to look for

• The floor plan in the top-left tracks all nine people who know you, live. Coloured dots are the ones still to avoid.
• The list in the top-right is a crumpled receipt. Items strike through as they go in.
• Everybody speaks. Brenda, Marisol, Mr. Alderman and the rest are voiced, and the writing is the point — the toast that reads "the silence gets a texture" is doing as much work as the composure bar.
• The end card is your receipt: total spent, times seen and named, people who now know, and dignity remaining. Then the list resets and you can go back in.

It takes about ten minutes to lose your dignity, less if you take the pregnancy test out first.