SpearPoint Publications

It was a little after midnight when the creaky antiquated bus pulled into the shabby village, the last stop on this little-used once-a week rural route. We six hours late due to an unexpected detour around a collapsed bridge over…

For Jackie and Goody, the morning after the press conference the previous day began like any other—Jackie getting ready for her first day as CEO of the Good Life Cookie Company and Goody looking forward to a meeting about a…

7

Jackie returned from her room an hour after she'd abruptly ceased telling Goody about her encounter with Martha and Bobby in the company parking lot and then hurry off to find her laptop. Goody was on the patio hovering…

Jackie left Goody's house to go to work alone for the first time in their four years of working together. It was the morning after they'd celebrated reorganization of The Good Life Cookie Company. 

"Good luck," Goody shouted as Jackie…

"You sure that's the right number?" Bobby asked, referring to numbers on a stone column next to a gate across a driveway leading to a stand of maples. A house was not visible from the street. 

Martha looked at her…

"Where to now?" Jackie asked after they left the New Deal restaurant, got into Goody's Subaru Forester, and headed west on Halsey. 

"My house," Goody answered," glancing at Jackie, then turning north on 47th Avenue. "We need to brainstorm. I've…

Jackie looked at Goody without responding to the woman's question about how she'd ended up homeless. She wondered how much to tell this stranger—whether to dig up a past that was so painful, so dark. 

Twenty years earlier there'd been…

Waiting to pay for a pound of mushrooms, Goody responded with anger when she realized a young woman was running off with her canvas bag near full of the fruit and vegetables she'd purchased that morning. "Stop her!" Goody yelled…

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…