White desk with pink notebook, roses, keyboard, and gold paperclips that Francesca Varela uses to write environmental fiction

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  • Stained Glass Ripples

    1–2 minutes

    The mist hangs there a cloud pressed to glass by early afternoon, the water flowing into churn and froth, the river stones chirping against each other as they toss under the force of the waterfall, and on the shore the blackened trunks of old firs catch sun through cloud light still healing from wildfire scars

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  • Canopy Sunlight

    1–2 minutes

    How many times have I walked through the forest and never noticed the face in the fallen tree, the lichen draped like brittle hair, the skin made of centuries of mud and fungi long exposed long cracked in the sun, the cheekbones made of desiccated roots, palled by spider-webs the lace reaching down the chin

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  • Snow Clouds

    1–2 minutes

    The clouds are threaded with mountain-pink, andthe kind of muted purple that reflects from pondwater as it lies still at the moment of dusk, and the ravens blink the snow away, calling in their Cascade dialects, throaty songsthat catchin the fir needles like sunlight, and the snow falls in patches between the canopy and atop

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  • Rain on the Ocean

    1–2 minutes

    The ocean is waiting there, pock marked in the way that dew hangs from jeweled firs, how itmelts the soft snow beneath it, and farther out, the white painted light is made ghostly where the horizon meets it and the white foam fray and the clouds brushed and bruised and half the ocean drawn through

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Learn more about Francesca Varela's novels