Fiction: the steel chair books a different Fresno

Fiction. This is not a news report. None of the finishes in this piece happened.

The record is short and it is not this story. WWE’s results for the October 26 Raw say Sami Zayn beat Je’Von Evans, Bayley beat Lyra Valkyria, IYO SKY beat Raquel Rodriguez, Ethan Page and Big Cass beat Chad Gable and Dragon Lee, and Becky Lynch beat Liv Morgan by disqualification. The Undisputed WWE Championship and the Women’s World Championship stayed where they were. Anything after this paragraph is invention. If a sentence here and a sentence on the results page disagree, the results page is the one that happened.

In this fiction, the chair in the middle of the ring is the booker, and it is tired of finishes that need a footnote. It does not have a legal name. It does not work for a promotion. It is a folding chair with opinions, which is a ridiculous premise and the reason this file is not in the news sitemap.

In this fiction, the chair waits until the Helluva Kick and then refuses the pin. The referee counts two and the chair slides itself under Evans’s shoulder. Zayn argues with the furniture. The chair, narrating, says it has seen enough controversial wins for one autumn. In this fiction, Evans sits up, the chair offers itself as a weapon and then changes its mind, and the match ends when both men stop and read the Crown Jewel card out loud like a script they are allowed to reject. No winner is declared. The title floats up to the lights and hangs there, a blank plate, until someone in the building laughs. None of that is a result. The real pin happened. The real title stayed with Zayn.

In this fiction, the No Disqualification match is polite. Bayley and Valkyria set the chairs in a circle and take turns describing finishes they will not use. The kendo stick becomes a conductor’s baton. The table remains a table. In this fiction, they agree the submission happened in some other building and shake hands over the top rope while the chair applauds by rattling. The real match, on WWE’s page, ended with a kendo-stick crossface. The fiction is the handshake. Do not quote the handshake as news.

In this fiction, the women’s title match is the chair’s favorite bad idea. The Dis-arm-her is applied, The Judgment Day arrive, and the chair trips them with a single honest leg. The referee does not call for the bell. Lynch and Morgan look at the chair, then at each other, and in this fiction they finish the match without a cash-in, a save, or a disqualification. The chair will not say who wins, because a fictional winner is how a labeled story gets screenshotted into a rumor. The real finish was a disqualification. Morgan remained champion. Stratton’s contract was not cashed in. Those sentences live on the results page and in the title file. They do not live in the chair’s ending, because the chair’s ending does not exist.

In this fiction, the tag match is a debate. Page and Cass and Gable and Lee sit on the apron and let the chair explain rope breaks. The Egoplex is mime. Nobody is taken out at ringside. The real result is the one WWE printed, with Gable out of the match and Dragon Lee losing. The mime is the joke. The joke is not a spoiler and not a report.

The chair closes by trying to book Charleston as a night of exhibitions and is told, by the narrator, that Friday’s matches are announced in actual sources and do not need a piece of furniture. In this fiction, the chair accepts a smaller role. It will appear in the art, under a spotlight, between a masked luchador and a hooded figure, and it will not be a person. The Raw hub is where the real Fresno file lives. The standards are why this one is walled off. If you need a finish, use the results page. If you need a chair with a pen, you are already in the right room, and the room is marked fiction on purpose.

In this fiction, the chair tries one last booking on the way out of the building. It wants the Fresno crowd to chant its name, and the crowd chants a different piece of furniture. It wants a confetti cannon. The cannon is a broom from the real No Disqualification match, which the chair is not allowed to swing, because the broom was in WWE’s results and the swing would be a new move. The chair sits down in its own spotlight, which is the illustration on the home page, and it files a complaint that it does not get a profile. The complaint is denied. Profiles are for people with sourced records. A talking chair has this page and nothing else. That limit is the joke and the rule. The about page says the site will not invent a finish. The chair is what it sounds like when someone tries anyway, with the banner still on the door.

Works cited

• WWE