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

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  • Take A Stone From The Desert

    2–3 minutes

    Take a stone from the desert. Carry it home with you; keep it safe in the inner pouch of your backpack. Unwrap it carefully. Feel how it has cooled. Turn it over in your hands. Feel the softness of your fingers, exfoliated by wind and stone, and how the rock, too, is smoother than you

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  • The Piano – A Short Story

    6–9 minutes

    I have been around fur-ones all my life. They do not have fur on the tips of their fingers, but it is everywhere else. On some it is pale, touched but mostly unseen, and on others—the nose-ones mostly—it is an encapsulating seed, the vessel through which they experience the world. As you can see I

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  • At the Mall – A Short Story

    1–2 minutes

    Sharp elbows. Sharp like shark fins, serrated like old kitchen knives with wooden handles. A smell like skunk and burnt canola oil, something stuffed away and long hidden from sunlight. There is no overhead music but—velcro, children’s shoes, spilled fountain drinks left sticky on the tiles. Glass boxes filled with plastic cloth, on plastic people

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  • Backs on Grass – A Short Story

    4–7 minutes

    Where did we come from? I don’t mean life. That’s been documented already; the pale curtain of lightning; the dense seas—Venusian, black like boiled leather; the first spark that tethered us all to water. Roger Gray was the first one to record it on video. He won the Nobel Prize for it about a decade

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Learn more about Francesca Varela's novels