Discard: Short Story

By Michael Christie

From the short-story collection The Beggar’s Garden, “Discard” tells the story of Earl, who, after the death of his beloved wife, Tuuli, retreats into his basement. He emerges to track down his estranged, homeless grandson, leaving food and other broken-down bits of things in dumpsters for him to find.

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.

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• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Nov 13, 2012
• ISBN: 9781443421751

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

Discard

Michael Christie

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Discard

Copyright

About the Publisher

Discard

Earl drives from his motel into the fray of the city. He stops at a downtown supermarket where he selects two preroasted chickens from a warming cabinet and places them in his carry basket.

Sunday supper? says the clerk, a man of his age. Earl is surprised such a person would be working as a grocery cashier. With my grandson, Earl says, feeling suddenly disloyal for the admission. He pays and, to spare the man the trouble, bags the chickens himself.

He drives the short distance to English Bay, parks, and pops open the domed-plastic container. Steam bursts from the joint as he tears a leg loose. Half-listening to the radio, he eats nearly the whole bird, digging morsels out from between the bones with his fingers. It is winter, and night in this place comes much too early for Earl—a vacuuming kind of dark that settles in by four-thirty. He sits watching the lights of the countless freighters tremble in the void of the inlet. They resemble distant cities, so numerous it’s impossible to tell where one ends and another begins. He glances at the green digits of his dashboard clock: 8:30. He’s not late but should be going.

Earl recalls the day not long ago when he bought this car—a small, efficient thing, well suited for a city—and how he laboured that night for hours to set its clock and finally was forced to return the next day to the dealership for a kid in a blue jumpsuit to set it for him. He’d always rather do a job himself, even if it took three times as long, and when his wife was still alive there were many nights where his dinner sat cold on the table while he fiddled, red-faced, with something in his workroom.

Earl steps into the sea-rich air and tosses the picked carcass into the trash. As he backs the car away, his headlights catch a primer-grey sea bird descending greedily upon the barrel.

Soon he’s trolling the narrow streets of the West End, hunting for a nook he can shoehorn his silver hatchback into. He nuzzles up behind a carpet-cleaning van only a few blocks from where he is going. He reaches for his aluminum cane on the rear seat, and is pleased to find the second chicken container still warm