Under the Tarp

By Ernie Hurd

A devastating novella about love, loss, and the systems that fail us.
Maya has been living under a tarp on Hastings Street for eleven months. She's twenty-nine years old, addicted to fentanyl, and invisible to most of the world. But when David, a retired man haunted by his own sister's death, starts bringing her coffee every Tuesday, everything becomes more complicated.
David can't save Maya. He knows this. But he can say yes-something he failed to do for his sister Janice twenty years ago.
Linda walks the same streets, carrying an urn with her son Tyler's ashes. He died in this neighborhood too, another casualty of the opioid crisis, another life the system was designed to destroy.
Under the Tarp is not a story of redemption. It is a story about bearing witness to suffering when saving is impossible. It's about the human capacity to demand compassion in the face of systemic cruelty, and to refuse invisibility even when the world insists on it.
Built from the real stories of real people experiencing homelessness and addiction across Canada, this novella examines the particular ways that family betrayal, pharmaceutical negligence, and systemic failure compound trauma into something inescapable.
Sometimes compassion can't save. But it can matter anyway.
Trigger Warnings: Childhood sexual assault, drug addiction and overdose, homelessness, sexual coercion, family trauma, suicidal ideation.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0H49JQJKY
• ISBN13: 9798180265395
• Release Date: June 2026
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 46 Pages
• Weight: 0.17 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.1" x 6.0" x 9.0"