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

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  • Painting the Sky

    81 words

    I am here beneath the rust, painting the soft skies with the tips of my fingers, wedged between river and hill, watching through maple leaves as thin as insect wings, the stained glass through which the wind dries, ochre and purple, behind the cloudlight, and it speaks to me in wildfire smoke and birdsong, the…

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  • Thorns

    165 words

    I walk down to the sand on a deer trail (or perhaps a human one) lined with a wall of blackberry bushes, snagged with spider-webs that hold like glue onto shore pine needles, and escaped petals of some neighbor’s night-blooming jasmine, and there’s a single swath of gray construction matting, frayed at the edges, and…

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  • City Walk

    276 words

    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

    95 words

    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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