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

BLOG

  • Before the Light

    407 words

    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,…

    Read more…

  • The Frogs

    257 words

    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,…

    Read more…

  • Half Moon

    637 words

    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…

    Read more…

  • The Crows and the Owl

    231 words

    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…

    Read more…

Learn more about Francesca Varela's novels