White desk with pink notebook, roses, keyboard, and gold paperclips that Francesca Varela uses to copy edit for romance, science fiction, and fantasy authors

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  • Before the Light

    2–3 minutes

    You have been here since before the light. Back then, the air tasted like brine, and smoke from village fires. There was no petroleum haze; no asphalt riverbeds. You were far from the ocean, but you knew it was there, just beyond the hill, sparkling with bioluminescence each night. You liked to think of it,

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  • The Frogs

    1–2 minutes

    We walked along a stream, the grasses short, almost silver, interspersed with red-leafed huckleberry and the tall, puffed heads of pasque flowers. Beyond the rush of the stream there was the drone of insects–bees, or mosquitos, somewhere far-off but omnipresent, in our chests like the thump of a bass. Suddenly the ground began to move,

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  • Half Moon

    3–4 minutes

    I could feel the cold moving up through the ground, winding blindly through the soil, through the dark narrows, the tree roots, the embedded ant tracks; it was the cold of a tired and sleeping earth, just there, beneath my feet. The night was quiet–no birds trilling, no cars in the distance, just the perfect

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  • The Crows and the Owl

    1–2 minutes

    All the smaller birds–the chickadees, the nuthatches, the song sparrows–dart through the bushes, turning their black-and-white heads, watching the fleeting wings up above, the crows with their loud and crinkled voices. They watch as the owl sits patiently, his wings tucked in, his eyes slowly blinking as the crows rush at him. He’s young, still

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Francesca Varela specializes in copy editing for romance, science fiction, and fantasy authors