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Etherea Magazine #10

Etherea Magazine, May 2022. A collection of wonderful speculative fiction, from authors around the globe.

We sit down for an interview with Kevin Klehr, author of The Midnight Man.

Gary Trow is the talent behind the Artist’s Showcase

The End of Men by Christina Sweeney-Baird is reviewed by Katie McIvor

THE STORIES:

How slowly a day can pass in the cold and the rain. At least, in my bookshop, it is warm and dry. Music seeps, cracked and distorted, from my old broken gramophone and the coffee pot bubbles cheerfully to itself. I lick my finger and turn the yellowed pages of my most recent acquisition; careful not to touch the letters directly. That would be most unfortunate – A Best Seller, by Helena McAuley

The boy commences shovelling the compressed carbon output from the barrow onto the sorting line to examine it properly. Rather, for the tower to examine, and tell him which to select to feed into their chambers for the next batch. He only needs to ask. Perhaps he is too prideful – The Quick Study, by C.H. Pearce

It lies on my pillow, as they do every morning when I wake. A delicate purple flower petal, barely the size of my pinky nail, fading to pale lavender at the narrow end. I’ve collected so many I’ve filled the jar that sits on my dresser – Teardrops, by Kat Heckenbach

A lonely planet drifts, nestled between warring empires. The husks of starships are her only company, the same that bombed her shores from orbit. Her lifeforms are extinct. Her oceans dried, diluted and acidified. Her atmosphere, unmoored by magnetism, was stolen by the gravity of a neighbouring gas giant. And now the unfiltered sun devours all trace of shadow, bombarding what little remains of the planet’s surface with flares and solar rays – Music for a Dying Planet, by Lewis Chenouth

My very atoms were fighting one another as I looked at her standing in my hotel room. Half of me wanted to rush to her, enwrap her in my arms, and cry into the familiar spot of her shoulder. Half of me wanted to scream, tear her to shreds; to verbally and physically strip her down to the bones. But because my atoms were at such a dilemma, I did nothing. I stood there, waiting for my body to destroy itself from the conflict writhing within it – Salt & Iron, by Kellie Fahy

“Sorry,” she winced in sympathy and reached toward my forearm, but stopped herself before she touched me. She knows all about what happened, read my case files before she agreed to let me shadow her. She also knows better than to dwell on it – Ride Along, by Rhonda Parrish

Failure brought me here. Following—and failing to verify—bunyip sightings along the Murray, I reached the Coorong coast under a storm-heavy sky that bogged my truck and near-fouled half my equipment. Funds dwindling, I retreated to the highlands south of Sydney. But water management in the Riverlands had disrupted, nay, destroyed the potential habitat, along with my hopes – In The Riverlands, Drowning, by Emma Louise Gill

I’m trying to clean up from one of the practice bouts but my mop is really only pushing blood around the Arena floor. A good mop is hard to find – Monstrous Behaviour, by Matt Tighe

Alice crouched behind a rosebush, ready to strike. Years of training, hordes of slain enemies, every obstacle and every victory brought her a step closer to this day. For only she could save Wonderland – Falling Upwards, by A. Zaykova

A stray cat sat on the doorstep as if it belonged there. Tiff shooed it away. It stared at her, blinked, and stalked slowly off. Marti cried – The Changing Table, by Salinda Tyson

Big, black eyes followed Felipinho as he clambered up the tresses and onto the balcony.  The juvenile giraffe wasn’t tall enough to reach him there, so the boy could talk to it without the risk of having his t-shirt chewed.  His mother hated that – Such Sweet Sorrow, by Gustavo Bondoni