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

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  • Sauvie’s Island

    144 words

    A piece of a sand dollar in the dark gray riverbed, embedded in pebbles hewn as fine as black pepper. Here on the banks of the Columbia, an hour’s drive from the ocean, the water feels like its own gentle coastline, quiet ripples and a steep drop-off, and seagulls that fluff their feathers in the…

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  • In the Dream

    137 words

    Sometimes I think I would rather live in the dream. As they sit by the fire, holding beer cups in their gloved hands, their mouths rippling with laughter, I press my back to the dying warmth, the last glow of sun, bled into rock, and, through the cold air above my sleeping bag, I watch…

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  • Wolf

    105 words

    The salt-worn trees and their terraced arms white as bone, as cartilage, twined into rope and laced like string between cloud and earth. Wind blows through, caught in the late-light shadows, the teeth of baleen whales, gusts of seawater and krill, sea-wind and spring mosquitos, the ocean giving each footstep to the ferns, a slipped,…

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  • Birdless

    544 words

    The mornings I best remember are those of my elementary school summers. I’d wake up at 7 or 8 am, for no reason but the habit of school lingering into my sleep schedule. I’d have some cereal, and put on jean shorts, and a baggy cotton t-shirt, and black rubber rain boots, and the old…

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