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

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  • City Walk

    1–2 minutes

    I walk down the sidewalk, the sun starting to grow hazy with sunset, the roads quiet, the pavement textured with needles from old-world cedars and cigarette crumbs and the basal leaves of dandelions, and I hear the echoed voices of people in their backyards, sitting on their porches, drinking wine by the hydrangeas, and every…

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  • The Painted Hills

    1–2 minutes

    Those bands of red ochre; those black mottled lines grayed down by the wind;they have the matte luster of hand prints on cave walls, where firelight once feathered into aurochs and horses and bison and deer, their bodies rounded bythe dun of crushed shells, painted by peeling skin against porous rock, animal eyes thin-swept by…

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  • Redwoods at Dusk

    1–2 minutes

    Sunlight frayed silken curtained through dusk branches, dust twinkling in the way of fireflies, ferns sorrel and huckleberry starts quivering as low-down sunlightslants their leaves with waning warmth and the wind carriesfar-off fogand river smells and the canopy above them turns in the other wind the hidden wind that never reaches the ground.

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  • Hillside Grass

    1–2 minutes

    The wind through hillside grass, yellow-tumbled, changing shape and shadow as though a cloud is passing over them, casting a thin veil of dark-gray light that blends into the purple heads of the wild grasses, and if you watch carefully enough, it appears as though the hill is moving, just pieces of it, carpets of…

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Learn more about Francesca Varela's novels