Jess is a grocery store worker whose job has been labeled “essential,” though it mostly makes her invisible. Ben is a newly unemployed restaurant worker whose unemployment checks buy him vodka, weed, and time to spiral. Through empty streets, strip-club absurdities, expired coupons, and casino ashtrays, their lives cross in ways that are both deeply ordinary and quietly extraordinary. What begins as a cynical survival instinct turns into a fragile, accidental intimacy. Told in alternating close third-person perspectives, the story explores loneliness, sex, small acts of kindness, and the absurd theater of American life during lockdown. It combines sharp humor, existential undertones, and gritty realism drawn from my background in hospitality work.