Wrong Passenger by Bryan Vale
They let us start working again in April and you never knew if you were picking up the right people. It was already hard to tell because a profile picture looks way different when you're looking for a silhouette on a dark sidewalk with cars honking behind. You have to say the names as a question. "Monte?" "Ellie?" "Travis?" And they say yes or no.
But it was harder to tell with the masks, and harder to ask the question with the mask muffling your words. So you never knew — you just drove the people who got in.
Now I've learned to read attitude, body language, to know how close I need to cut it on red lights — if they'll be mad if they're late, or mad if you risk their lives too much. The ratings are everything.
So I knew the guy in my back seat was distraught.
He slumped in and didn't reply to me. He was just head and shoulders with a black mask on. I'm always hustling so I just started driving. Following the line on the phone's map.
And when we got there the guy leaned forward and tapped me.
"Hey man. You just drove me to the wrong place. Maybe you're the wrong driver. But I was gonna go to the bridge and jump off. And we're at a coffee shop. That means something to me. That's gotta mean something."
“Even at such a short length (originally "Wrong Passenger" was 250 words long), I felt like this story's ending landed with a thud. I sent it out anyway, but after it got rejected by a couple of flash fiction journals, I decided to shelve it for a while. Recently I reopened the doc, read it over, and felt the story was actually pretty good. The language was precise, and the action was clear despite the short length. By a chance of formatting, the last 14 words of the story didn't show up on page 1 — and suddenly I realized cutting those last 14 words altogether gave the ending a lot more punch. The classic rule of editing: usually, shorter is better!”
Bryan Vale (he/him) is a writer from Berkeley, California, United States. He writes fiction, poetry, and educational articles about technology. His work has appeared in Moving Force Journal and Short Fiction Break. Find Bryan on Twitter and Instagram at the handle @bryanvalewriter.