The Extra: Short Story

By Michael Christie

From the critically acclaimed short-story collection The Beggar’s Garden, “The Extra” features a young, mentally disabled man and his best friend, Rick, who find work as extras on a film set. This story was nominated for a Journey Prize.

The Beggar’s Garden follows a diverse group of characters, from a bank manager to a drug addict to a retired Samaritan, a web designer, and a car thief, as they drift through each other’s lives in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. Michael Christie’s darkly funny debut collection won the Vancouver Book Award; it was longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and was a finalist for the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize.

HarperCollins brings great works of literature to life in digital format, upholding the highest standards in ebook production and celebrating reading in all its forms. Look for more titles in the HarperCollins short-stories collection to build your digital library.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Nov 13, 2012
• ISBN: 9781443421782

Michael Christie

MICHAEL CHRISTIE received his MFA in creative writing at the University of British Columbia. Prior to this, he worked in a homeless shelter on Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside and provided outreach to the severely mentally ill. A former professional skateboarder, he is a senior writer for Color Magazine, an award-winning publication that celebrates skateboarding culture. Michael Christie lives in Thunder Bay, and is working on his next book, a novel.

Book preview

The Extra

Michael Christie

Contents

Cover

Title Page

The Extra

Copyright

About the Publisher

The Extra

Me and Rick, we rent a basement suite at the bottom of Baldev’s house. Actually, we only call it that to Welfare so they’ll give us the most amount of money for rent, but really it’s just a basement, no suite part. The walls are two-by-fours with cotton candy in between and there’s no toilet or sink and it smells bad like your wrist when you leave your watch on too long. We sleep on hunks of foam beside the furnace between an orange lawnmower and used cans of paint that Baldev keeps down there. We take dumps at the gas station down the street and pee in plastic jugs we pour down a drain in the alley. Then at the tap on the side of the house, we rinse them and fill them for drinking and washing our pits and crotches. We used to have different jugs but then we got tired of remembering which was which.

When I say we rent, I really mean I do because my disability worker, Linda, sends a cheque for five hundred dollars a month to Baldev because she can’t trust me with my money for the reason of my brain being disabled. But me and Rick and Baldev have this deal where Baldev gives us two hundred of the rent back in cash as long as we don’t complain about the basement and how it’s just a basement.

Rick needs my help. He can’t get welfare because years ago he got kicked off for not telling them he had a job while he was still getting cheques. But Rick says we’re