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

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  • The Woven Tree

    185 words

    I know two trees that are woven together, fiber by fiber, root by root, braided together after countless days, and moments, and centuries, holding onto each other, their branches shimmering together in every wind. Their canopies are a tapestry, their roots indistinguishable from one another, like a basket holding the world in, tucked into clay…

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  • Leaf Rain

    148 words

    You stand under the big leaf maples, in the same place where, months earlier, you watched threads of sunlight weave between branches, catching on threads of spider-web, everything floating and filmy and lit by the sun. Today, the sky is cut-through, opened, revealing itself for the first time in a year, and you notice that…

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  • The Glass Moon

    135 words

    Moonlight caught up in all the layers of the atmosphere and filtered by glass, colorless, resting on the backs of my hands. We once would have been out in this moonlight, bathing in it, our eyes adjusted to the dark, our hands warmed by fires, and I feel nostalgic for those moments that my ancestors…

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  • Mountain Water

    268 words

    The mountain is here. It hides in the silhouette of the morning sun, its gray rock softened to the color of the moon, and it watches me as I walk the streamside plains. This is a place of blue rapids tossing beneath fir branches, and dense, dark clouds gathered like flocks of starlings. Today the…

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