SpearPoint Publications

Priscilla Good Henley, known to her friends as Goody, had spent a year and two months mourning the death of Clarence, her beloved husband of fifty-three years. With impressive fortitude, she successfully made it through the usual shock and then…

It had taken Harm a couple of weeks to make enough money for bus fare to Corvallis, where Barney Sieglitz lived, another haircut, and buy a new shirt and jeans—he didn’t want to look like a bum when he met…

By this point in the story, the reader knows that Harm's only goal has been to make it through each day, stay safe at night, and be ready to start again the next morning. But with his decision to become…

It was a typical rainy Portland spring night, cool but not cold, breezy but not windy. Harm had secured the dry recessed doorway of a Covid-closed barber shop on Sandy Boulevard for the night. He sat on a double layer…

When Harmon Zorn was little the few friends he'd had called him “Harmie.” But by the time he’d made it to high school, the darkness in him had surfaced, and even fewer friends he had called him “Harm,” as if…

The following week, Travis and Lucile received good news from one of the Multnomah County agencies that works with homeless people—they'd qualified for a two-bedroom rent-subsidized house in southeast Portland’s Buckman neighborhood. Jack's father had helped with the application and…

We left Episode Four as Jack called his father and told him about what he and Travis were doing. Hoping his parents would appreciate what they’d accomplished, he invited them to the rat circus show. His father said they'd be…

“It was Bigrat! Didn’t you hear him?” Travis said, as he approached the box where he kept the rat. When he reached it, he looked over the edge, then gasped, a look of shock distorting his face. 

“Pa!” Travis screamed…

When the big rat stopped nosing around for crumbs and rose up on his haunches, Travis said, “I heard you.” 

"I didn't say anything," Lucile said from where she sat near the burn barrel. She got up and went to…

Later that evening, after the stew his Lucille had made and shared with the other homeless campers, Travis set out eleven traps. The next morning, every trap held a rat, and the rat man bought them all. With part of…

“Hey! Travis! That sack looks alive. Must’ve been a good catch,” a run-away-teenager named Jack yelled when a tall, hatless man in his mid-thirties appeared in the misty morning light from around a bridge abutment. Travis had longish red hair…

Karla followed Madeline through the kitchen of the mass murder gang's Southeast Portland safehouse to the attached garage where Madeline had parked her car. After they got into her old Subaru, Madeline said, "Cover your eyes," and handed Karla a…