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Uptown Fare
March 10, 2026 in 299 Words, Fiction, Poetry, Books, Flash Fiction, Literature, Short stories, Writing, Stories, Very Short Novels | Tags: Prejudice, Race, Violence, Knife | by davidbdale | 7 comments
They are prejudiced, the cabbies in town. Because the sun has risen every morning in memory, they expect it to dawn during this shift too, and to dawn again one minute earlier each day until the solstice, then later again each morning like the year before. They predict low wages. They anticipate dents and rattles and non-lethal automotive malfunctions and for their tips to be insufficient to ditch the business altogether to the younger hacks and spend their days fishing for trophy. And they don’t take dark-skinned fares uptown. They explain it this way:
Seven times I’ve seen a knife in this cab and two guns. Usually I just see it; it’s shown to me, or it’s deployed by someone to threaten someone else. But twice it’s used to injure or persuade me physically. Once I’m stabbed. Once a shot is fired through the windshield. Of the nine times, each time I’m the only native Caucasian in the car. So I have a policy. No dark fares after sundown, none uptown any time of day. It’s common sense. You judge from what you’ve seen, you act on what you know, you live to serve your sentence.
To confound this logic, a group of us, a very small but steadfast group, have been systematically stabbing cabbies. We dress well, carry umbrellas, and stand outside expensive hotels with a finger in the air. We kiss our dates goodbye and get inside. We introduce ourselves invariably as Mr. White, which most of them later recall. We entertain our driver with the same rap every time. We’ve been injured, we say, sometimes grievously, in multiple, near-fatal automobile accidents, but we can’t remember what color the cars were. Then we cut them, carefully, therapeutically, to alter the odds the only way we know how.
Copyright ©1997
Afterschool Bomb Club
February 7, 2026 in 299 Words, Afterschool, Bomb, Childhood, Class Work, Community, Crime, Danger, Death, Disability, Flash Fiction, Memory Loss, PTSD, Short stories, Survivor, Terrorism, Violence, War, Weapon | Tags: 299 Words, Very Short Novels | by davidbdale | 1 comment
When I was going-on-six we nearly blew up the railroad station. By my birthday, we’d managed it. I only know because it’s gone. The rest, including these scars, is fog in the attic. Back then we got explosives easier than rum. The ten-year-olds figured out how to render the volatile agent from unexploded land mines in boiling water and pack it into cakes they could ignite with an improvised fuse, knowledge I had to earn with heroics. That I remember like a verse. A stand of birch trees loomed like soldiers to our West. We chopped them down with submachine guns cleaner than chainsaws. The woods we defended were chunky with abandoned munitions. Once gathered and sorted, to keep them from rivals, we stowed them under floorboards in a shed outside barracks that were once a country church. We’d meet after school, grab arms, wrestle with their rusty actions, and hike down to the tracks. Grenades were for kids with all their fingers, but I had my own Uzi and a Colt sidearm nobody else wanted with plenty of bullets. If we’d been school shooters, the mothers would have wailed about who armed the killer instead of where he got his motivation. We played with the toys we were given. For the freight station exercise, the older boys set blast cakes beneath the stationmaster’s desk and laid a powder trail as a fuse. They wouldn’t let me see. Survivors say I took it badly, that I fired into the treetops, that something crashed through the branches, that it thudded onto the roof. They wouldn’t let me see. Next they say I threw my pistol to the ground, a round discharged, another thud. Again I demanded to see. But then the blast. Then here. Then now. Wherever whenever this is.
Original Copyright © February 13, 2007
Revised Copyright © February 07, 2026
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