She didn’t just walk, there were steps that were skipped and steps that were sluggish, like an actor rehearsing a part in a war movie where the soldier gets a quarter of their leg blown off. Panting from the effort it took her to move, she approached the other extras standing in a circle. 

‘I heard the director's father was a World War two veteran who served in France,’ the man with the shaggy brown hair said, speaking with the tone of a critic. One of the second assistant guys told me the director interviewed his dad for months before the dad died just to nail down this one scene in the square with the statue and everything. Can’t see any reason we need another fucking movie about this war, especially one that is ripping off all of those post-war German films of the sixties.’ 

‘There is a reason. If you follow me over th-,” she was interrupted by the man with the shaggy brown hair. ‘We don’t need another pointless history lesson where you make us follow you around just to show off your wounded combatant limping routine thing. It’s embarrassing. You’re only an extra here, barely on camera.’ He smiled when he interrupted her, revealing a small gap in between his teeth on the right side of his mouth that disgusted her. It didn’t seem hard for him to interrupt her and he would later forget it even happened.

A bronze statue sat on top of a marble base, with old looking lettering etched into its center, reading Charlemagne et Ses Leudes. The marble base was riddled with bullet holes and the pieces from those impacts were on the ground all around the base. She scraped her foot along the pieces of rubble and it sounded like skateboard wheels on pavement. Her path left a sideways, shoe shaped trail, leading to the base of the statue. Realizing no one in the circle had followed her, she limped back towards the group a few steps to try and get their attention away from the shaggy haired man.

‘Marble that has been blown off its base just looks like rocks. Hey, is marble rocks?’ She yelled the second part at the group who were now questioning their patience for awkwardness. ‘They’re just rocks rig--?’ ‘Yes’, the shaggy haired man that had interrupted her before interrupted her a second time, ‘they are fucking rocks so you should fit right in with them.’ 

She took the man's advice and sat down next to the marble pieces, later laying her head down to be at eye level with the off-white mini mountains. They reminded her of the beach near her made-up home in France: beaches that were not very fun, not very hospitable, not amenable to sunbathing or beach volleyball or burying yourself. ‘These rocks are for burying forever’, she said with a quiet sigh, remembering the fake horrors that made up her character's backstory, memories of  partially buried body parts along the French coast. 

The sun tried peeking through the clouds to ruin the filtered lighting that had been so sought after all day. After laying around for a few minutes, she got onto her knees, again whispering at one of the marble pieces, ‘on the ground you are the same as all your friends but in my hand you will be something special,’ and hurled the stone. The group of people could not hear her yell out ‘incoming’, as she was still whispering in her rock voice. 

The rock sailed past the other extras and landed near the food service tent, where only actors who had lines could enter. After the group of extras stopped laughing long enough to catch their breaths, she shuffled past them, half slug and half deer, staring each one in the eyes before landing on the man that had twice interrupted her. 

‘I can teach you how to aim,’ he said with a smirk. ‘You can’t teach me a goddamn thing,’ she said, the words pouring out of her mouth like throw up, first in a steady flow and then in chunks by the time she reached the goddamn. 

She started to walk away but turned back towards the man, his nervousness delayed by the sight of her awkward gait. It wasn’t until she had waited long enough to make everyone else nervous that the man shifted his posture. She shifted her weight too, balancing onto her fake good leg. Half shuffling through the circle towards the man, she put her open fist behind her head as if holding a ball and the man started to laugh again nervously. 

‘Teach me how to aim,’ she said calmly. 

There were no lessons in aiming that day. 

Tired of these people that appeared to be sabotaging her big break, she sat down next to the generators near the food tent, singing in harmony with the electricity that she wanted to touch, if only to give her some real pain to boost the illusion of pain that consumed her method. ‘I can aim,’ she said to herself, ‘it’s my character that can’t aim, since she was always kept at home to do the chores and not let out to do all of those boy things.’ 

She took a little piece of a leaf from the ground and threw it several inches in front of her, picking it up each time and throwing it again until they were both three feet away from where they started. The leaf took her inside the food tent, where she entered with her nose tilted upwards, following the smell of European cheeses and fancy coffee. 

‘Yes, can I help you.’

‘No,’ she said. ‘No but you can tell me where that leaf went.’ 

‘What leaf?’ 

‘The one that I followed in here.’ She went on to describe the leaf to the person in the tent, how it had bits of brown freckles on its yellow skin and a chunk missing out of one side that looked like a bug had gotten hold of it. It was one of many inspirations for her: a leaf with a chunk missing from one side, small rocks that made up a marble base, a group of seven people with an undesirable eighth member.

The tent for the snacks shuddered in the wind and she walked straight through it, taking her time to make sure her gait was perfect and her stare was dead-eyed. No one important noticed her of course, she was just an extra here. 

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She sat down at the computer to do her second job and contemplated the difference in time between entering the number eleven, typing in the 1 and then the 1, and the number nineteen, typing in the 1, and then, the 9. The nineteen always led to mistakes. Mistakes, though easily solved, were mistakes nonetheless and cut into her time, the only thing she could somewhat control, if only for a few seconds a day. Rounding numbers was purposeful. Even if it led to the wrong bottom line, it wasn’t her bottom line. 

Her mind often drifted during the menial tasks that she was destined to complete for the rest of her life, never forgiving herself for not being good enough at identifying which method of acting to method act. Typing numbers into little boxes and then typing numbers into little boxes and then typing into little boxes and then using the mouse to go back a few boxes had some kind of destiny about it. Her attempts to thwart this fate took place on movie sets, where she faced the ignorance of people who only allowed those deemed stars of the show to truly get into their character. The dream of being allowed to dive deeply into some other life, no matter the magnitude of the role, was always hampered by the actor’s need to get a paycheck and the pressure to pretend to not care.

‘Boxes from here on out,’ she thought. 

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The grocery store was desolate when she arrived after completing all of her work, hobbling into the store with a rhythm like a half broken Michael Jackson robot. “Watch Me” was on the grocery store speaker. One of her legs maintained its pace and one whipped around and this repeated itself as she walked past the cashier. 

‘Hello, how are you,’ the cashier said all in one breath without making eye contact with her. 

‘Well,’ she muttered to herself, changing her pace to match the part of the song when they ask you to whip and then they ask you to nae nae. In the first aisle she could find, she felt at peace, telling herself she had arrived at the realest version of her non-actor destiny, interacting with each box in its own unique way. She picked up and caressed their colorful divots and admired their small imperfections. 

She whispered to the little box of broth, ‘Hello little chickadee, I can hear you in there,’ and knocked with one finger on the box, smiling. ‘Make sure you stay nice and safe in there.’ She squished her face up against the box so close that she didn’t notice the person coming down the aisle. 

It was the man from the set and he beamed with a smile, revealing the same gap on the side of his mouth. 

‘Hi,’ he said, already laughing at the sight of her, ‘what, why are you here? I thought you lived on the other side of town?’ 

‘I don’t live here,’ she said quickly, putting the broth in her cart with a smash to try and move on to the next aisle, away from the man and towards all of the boxes that needed encouragement to survive. 

The wheels on the right side of the cart were not in unison with ones on the left, spinning on separate planes as she gripped the handle. She matched the imperfection of the cart with her wounded gait. The speed at which she could walk was far slower than someone who didn’t get their leg blown off, so the man quickly caught up to her. As she stopped her cart in the international aisle, the man pulled up beside her, smiling and questioning her movements as if he was the director and she was the actor in his movie. 

‘Did I see you talking to that box of broth?’

‘Working on a new part where you play a crazy bitch? Because you have that nailed down so you probably don’t need any more practice.’

‘Why don’t you act normal on set? You can’t get an Oscar for being an extra on some shitty war movie. You know that right? That there isn’t an Oscar for Best Extra?’

‘What even is your deal? You come to the set every day and act like you are the only one of us who can act. We are all extras. You don’t need to keep on limping all around the set and acting like you’ve seen all the atrocities of war. It’s offensive to people that have actually seen war. Stop appropriating wartime trama for your dumb fantasies of being noticed by someone on set it’s not going to happen and you end up making the rest of us look bad. You’re fucking limping around right now in this store for Christ’s sake. You’re not a real actor, you're just a crazy bitch that has been allowed to be crazy under the cover of being obsessed with being someone else.’

During his seventh question, she took a bottle of orangy-red habanero sauce from the section titled Mexican, removed the bottle from its box, and broke it over his head. The trauma from the war her character had to live through activated the character's PTSD. The shaggy haired man let out a scream as she watched, admiring the freedom the hot sauce now felt, removed from its rectangular grave and its glass coffin, exposed yet again to the world and all of the bacteria in the air trying to kill it, her, and the man. 

Her gaze shifted downward as she reached the checkout line, one foot quickly shuffling past the beeps while the other dragged behind. She smiled, the left side of her face a little more expressive than the right, to ensure her face knew what to do when the time came for her to be shot. ‘You have to pay for that,’ the cashier said with a neutral tone.

The shopping cart somehow kept its path once she let it go free, smashing into the dirty window next to the change machine and the crappy plastic toy dispenser. The cashier was shocked and started to pick up the phone to call the police. The woman paused and turned towards the cashier and then quickly smiled her lopsided smile, limped to the right a step, and made sure to show the cashier that she was a wounded combatant of war with shell-shock in her eyes. And for the first time, it was true. She had just been to war in the international food aisle. She saw the horrors of international negotiations and close-quartered combat of chemical warfare. Her acting worked. The cashier took pity on her, asking if everything was alright and if she needed any bags. 

‘I brought my own,’ she said, and never went to that grocery store again. 

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