Revere Karma

By Sandra McDonald

Four short stories of whimsy and mystery set in Revere, Massachusetts by award-winning author Sandra McDonald. Includes:

Mrs. Gillingham's Constitutional - a walk up Winthrop Ave, with a twist.

Constituent Work - magic at City Hall.

Recipe for Survival - cooking up tragedy on Bellingham Ave.

Life Sentence - a murderer on Charger Street.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Sandra McDonald
• Release date: Jan 14, 2012
• ISBN: 9781466027497

Sandra McDonald

SANDRA MCDONALD has been a Hollywood assistant, a software instructor, a bureaucrat, and an officer in the US Navy. Her short fiction has appeared in Realms of Fantasy, Strange Horizons, and elsewhere. Her novels include The Outback Stars and The Stars Down Under. She lives in Jacksonville, Florida.

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Revere Karma

Copyright 2012 by Sandra McDonald

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Table of Contents

Constituent Work

For three years I worked at City Hall on Broadway. It's a beautiful brick building that was built c. 1897 and still has many of the original features, including tile floors and marble busts. There's a vaulted auditorium that in years past was the scene of banquets, dances and other civic events. I tried to explore as many nooks and crannies of the building as I could, but I never quite wrangled my way into the belfry. This story first appeared in the magazine Say…. and was included in the anthology Best of the Rest.

Mrs. Gillingham’s Constitutional

Our heroine walks along Winthrop Ave from near the beach end up to the train station. A trolley once ran the length of that street and my father's family would frequent a butcher shop there. As a schoolgirl I walked it to get to the Julia Ward Howe Elementary School and later the Beachmont Middle School. In those years the street held a few convenience stores including Campbell's Variety and Griff's (now known as Heidi's Place), as well as funeral parlor and two empty churches. This story first appeared in the magazine Space & Time.

Recipe for Survival

My father inherited a recipe for brewis from his parents and grandparents, who emigrated from Harbour Grace, Newfoundland. My mother's father came from generations of seal hunters in St. Mary's, Newfoundland, some of whom died in 1914 ice tragedy. My father and his parents moved to their house on lower Bellingham Ave when he was a child. As a teen, he worked on the Boston Fish Pier before joining the Navy. Hood's Dairy is also real, and delivered milk to our doorstep when I was a kid. This story first appeared in the magazine Electric Velocipede

Life Sentence

This story beings at Northgate Shopping Center on Squire Road. My father remembers the seaplane ramp on the marsh behind the current buildings. Frank's house is based on the house my great-grandmother owned on Charger Street, which was part of a big construction boom in the 1950's. The Deep Six does not exist, but is very loosely based on the bar called the Squeeze-In which once stood near Beachmont Square. This story first appeared in the anthology Twenty Epics.

Constituent Work

Eleanor sat at her desk in an office that had once been a storage room, facing a man she could barely understand. Heat poured from a corner radiator, rose along walls of flaking green paint, met the barrier of the ten-foot ceiling and pushed back down against dusty filing cabinets. City Hall was full of rooms that either boiled or froze the occupants. It had been built in the days of horse-drawn carriages by men who'd come from Italy with skills in cutting marble and laying brick. They were all dead now, the laborers who'd pushed the old world forward into a new century of electricity, steam and civic order, but City Hall lived on and was attentive to its constituents on this January afternoon as sleet shushed against its window.

I'm sorry, Joseph Hallorhan said. This is the nervousness. When I was in France, they lost the papers. And then in New York. So I went to train them. I'm sorry. It takes me two minutes to get used to new people. I'm smart, you know.

In the thirty minutes since he'd sat down she had memorized the wrinkles of his face, the bulge at the end of his nose and the waves of gray hair that rose two inches above his forehead. Unlike many who wound up in her office he had taken care with his grooming. His clean-shaven face smelled like Old Spice and his blue track suit was frayed but clean. His gray overcoat hung in gentle, spotless folds on the door hook.

I don't know why they said I was overpaid, he said. That was a lot of money. Because of the papers. I'm sorry. Do you know, when I go in to the V.A., they moved the floors? It was eight and now it's two.

Eleanor feared she would be stuck in the office forever, lulled to paralysis by both the heat and Joseph's monotone voice. Like many others he had a complaint to lodge, but the nature of the perceived injustice was unclear. In the course of the day he had gone from confounding the girls in the Assessor's office to staring blankly at the Water Department Supervisor and then to holding his cap out to the mayor's secretary, who had sent him to Eleanor. She handled all the regular complaints, whether they be about taxes, potholes, late garbage