Sabrina sits on her hotel bed, her phone buzzes. She pulls it from her pocket, looks at it but doesn’t respond. She grabs her laptop and opens it, cracks her knuckles and types: Lance Dewlock. Google loads, “Did you mean Lance Bedlock?”

“No. Fuck, I meant what I typed,” she says to the screen.

She tries the images tab, it gives her several images, none of which look like they could possibly be a professional wrestler. She goes to the Conquest Wrestling Federation Website. She reads the roster top to bottom, then bottom to top just in case she missed it. Sees a section where she can type in a name so she types his name in.

No bio available.

“What? Oh, that’s just fine.”

She writes down his nickname, height, weight and finisher into her hotel notepad. The notes end up being about 4 lines of writing. She stares down at the page, her nose wrinkles.

“Hell. Lance, have you considered existing?”

She goes back to Google: Lance Dewlock wrestling. She finds nothing useful. Searches again, Lance Dewlock interview. The page loads halfway and then freezes. She waits a couple seconds and then starts clicking. The browser stops responding.

“Fuck. Fuck fuck sake, you pile of shit!”

She hits Ctrl-Alt-Delete. Nothing happens. She closes it and picks up her phone. There are eight missed texts from her husband, Dustin. She dials his number, he picks up on the third ring.

Dustin: “Hey.”

Sabrina: “Laptop shit out. Fix it.”

Dustin: “Okay what’s it doing?”

Sabrina: “Nothing. Why do you always do this?”

Dustin: “Like nothing nothing, is it frozen? Those are two different possible problems.”

Sabrina: “Jesus Christ. Frozen, I guess. Fix it.”

Dustin: “Okay, I’ll try. What were you doing when it froze?”

Sabrina rolls her eyes.

Sabrina: “Google, why the fuck does it matter? Why must you always have that tone?!”

Dustin: “Because I can’t see the laptop, Sabrina. I’m trying to help you.”

Sabrina: “I already told you what was wrong with it. Could you get to the point faster?”

Dustin: “Uh. Hold the power button down for six seconds. It’ll reboot it.”

Sabrina: “I know what a power button does, DUSTIN! I’m not stupid, DUSTIN!”

Dustin: “Sabrina, I am literally just trying to help you.”

Sabrina hangs up the phone and drops to the bed.

“Useless man,” she whispers, and closes her eyes. After a few minutes the phone rings, it’s Dustin. She lets it go to voicemail, he calls again. She rolls her eyes and answers it.

Sabrina: “What.”

Dustin: “We must have lost connection, did you try to hold the button down?”

Sabrina: “Yes, DUSTIN! How about you don’t talk to me like I’m daft.”

She presses the button just then, and holds it. After a few seconds the Dell logo appears, then a login screen, she says nothing. After roughly one minute of silence:

Dustin: “Did it work?”

Sabrina: “I gotta go…”

Dustin: “Are you coming home soon… or? …Marshall says to tell you he misses you…”

Sabrina hangs up again. A few minutes later, the phone buzzes. She picks it up to look at it. It’s a picture from Dustin. His parents’ living room, half the family crammed into it. Her son, Marshall, in the middle of it in an overcommitted dance outfit, red round face, one arm in the air while the family claps for him.

She zooms in on him, “Look at this fat little dipshit. Prancing around like a little girl. Embarrassing. Those twats are encouraging it… fuck my life.”

She deletes the picture without responding, then deletes it from ‘recently deleted’. Then she puts her phone in the nightstand with the Bible and closes it in there. She tosses the hotel notepad against the wall and closes her eyes.

The coffee shop is across the street from the shitty hotel. There is a line, Sabrina is in it, behind a woman with a stroller…

“Fuck. That thing going to do that this whole time? Really?”

The woman turns around and looks at her. She has a kind face, the sort that assumes strangers will be kind. “She’s a baby…”

The woman turns back around.

“I didn’t ask what it was lady.”

Sabrina looks at the ceiling, pondering when that thing will shut the fuck up. The line begins to move. At the counter the barista is a young man of perhaps twenty. Name tag says, ‘Kier’. He smiles at her when she approaches.

“Good morning! What can I craft for you?”

“Large coffee, black.”

He smiles at her again. “Ah. Rough night? Rough mornin’?”

Sabrina looks at the register. “Could say that. I gotta fight a man tonight and I ain’t got shit on him. But kid, how about you don’t talk to me? Give me my coffee and pipe down. Your voice is some shrill shit. It’s a black coffee, how about you pour it and hand it over, kid.”

His smile stays. “Sure Ma’am. Can I get a name for the order?”

“It’s black coffee. I am right fucking here man,” Sabrina states.

“Oh. We call it out when it’s ready…”

“Sabrinahatesyou. Jesus fuck. It’s just black coffee!”

He turns the screen around. Naturally, it asks for a tip before charging her card. She looks for the button that says zero or none. She pays, no tip, then goes to stand near the pickup counter furthest away she can be from the lady in the stroller with that thing making noises.

“Oatmilk vanilla latte for Lance,” the barista behind Kier shouts.

Sabrina turns to look at him. She sees a guy in a quarter zipped polo. He’s shorter than her. Looks like he belongs to Best Buy’s Nerd Squad. Obviously, he is not the Lance she is looking for. She starts watching his approach anyway.

He comes up to the side of the line, says excuse me to a man beside him. At the counter he takes his drink with his left hand, thanking the kid by name. He takes out two dollars out of his wallet and places them into the tip jar. Sabrina narrows her eyes.

“Lance?”

The man turns around. “Yeah?”

Sabrina straightens her posture and walks toward him. “You Dewlock?”

His right eyebrow goes up. “...no.”

“You wrestle?”

He looks down at himself, then back up at her. “Eh? No.”

Lance steps around her to presumably go to work, or just get away from her. Behind Sabrina, Kier calls out ‘large black coffee for Sabrinahatesyou’. She goes and grabs it, then heads out to leave. The woman with the stroller is behind her, she lets the door close behind her.

The woman gets the door with her elbow before it can close completely. The stroller knocks the frame on the way through, and the baby inside begins to make small noises.

“Excuse me! You could have held the door. You nearly hit my baby!”

Sabrina looks at the stroller and then at the woman. “Nearly. You could say thank you for missing.”

The woman’s jaw drops. “Are you SERIOUS?”

Sabrina takes a sip of her coffee. “...uh, yeah. I got one at home. I leave it somewhere before I go out in public. Perhaps you should too.”

The woman pulls the stroller closer to her. “That is an awful thing to say!”

“That’s an awful thing to bring to a coffee shop,” Sabrina retorts, pointing at the stroller.

The woman stands on the sidewalk with both hands on the stroller. “I feel sorry for your child!”

“So do I. He’s super fuckin’ fat. A chubby little bitch. Parades around like a glitzy little girl, and he’s shit at it. He thinks he’s great because he’s an everybody gets a trophy kid. He has like one move, he throws an arm up… and he’s outta breath from it. I asked the teacher to put him in the back, behind all the other kids. None of ‘em are big enough. He fucking sucks. Like your kid is gonna suck. Least I’ll tell ‘em the truth...”

Sabrina walks off before the woman can respond, crossing in the middle of the street, forcing a cab to stop on her account, she heads back to her hotel.

Behind the hotel desk a girl is placing trolley brochures into the wire racks. She looks up and sees Sabrina walking through the front doors. “Good morning, are you enjoying your stay?”

Sabrina looks at her, curls her lip upward. “No.”

Sabrina keeps walking and ignores the girls’ follow up ‘anything we can do for you’ and heads to the elevator. She gets upstairs and into her room, opens the door and sees the notepad she threw at the wall. She picks it up, looks at her notes from last night. She sets it down with her coffee on the small table.

“Checkmate architect? What the fuck does that even mean?”, she mumbles.

She sits on the bed and recalls she left her phone in the drawer with the bible. She opens the drawer and grabs it. She unlocks it and there are four texts from Dustin.

Did the button work?

Marshall wants to know if you liked the picture…

Are you okay?

I know you are busy but it would mean a lot to him if you said something nice….

“Something nice,” she says as she starts typing.

Tell him that outfit makes him look like a baked potato that was rejected from a disco.

She reads it back and replaces baked potato with ‘ham’. She sends it and sets the phone down then takes the bible out of the drawer and holds it in both her hands, looking down on it.

“Lance Dewlock…”

It’s a Gideon with a brown cover. She gives it a few seconds but nothing happens.

“Yeah. That’s about all I’ve gotten out of you.”

She turns it over to see the back. Nothing there. She opens it near the beginning and runs her fingers down the page until she stops at one. She goes through a few more columns before she throws it back into the drawer, shutting it in.

Her phone lights up on the bed.

…He just wanted his mom to notice him Sabrina.

Sabrina reads it, silences her phone and drops the phone face down on the bed and looks over to the notepad on the desk. She walks over to the desk and sits in the chair beside it and picks up the notepad, holding it out at arms length.

“Four fucking lines. Checkmate architect…somebody asked you what you wanted to be called and you picked that? Now some poor bastard has to say it out loud in front of people….” She whispers at the paper.

She grabs her coffee and takes a large drink. A little bit of the coffee has collected under the lid, and run onto her thumb. She wipes it on the chair then tears the page out of the notepad and crushes it in her hands. She rolls it into a ball and shoots it into the waste bin.

“Oh, look at that! Two points. Look at that, Lance went right where I put him. That’s more useful than my husband. Do it again tonight, go down when I hit ya and stay there. Remain more useful than my husband. It’s a low fucking bar.”