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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  • The God of the River

    1–2 minutes

    The river is opaque and fogged-over like sea glass unpierced by even the sharpest sunlight, its layers amorphous clouds of sediment and algae, almost brown, almost green, almost orange at the edges, slipping past you in the way of wind, catching on logs long buried, their arms reaching and rough and barnacled, their arthritic branches

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  • Winter Gray

    2–3 minutes

    Yesterday was the winter solstice. Today, it feels like the sun didn’t even rise. There’s the residue of it, the low-seeped daylight behind the clouds, but there’s no warmth; no casting of light upon the pavement. Just a gray sky the color of wet stones. We live in the Pacific Northwest, but I find it

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  • The Forest At Night

    1–2 minutes

    In the night there is a certain silence; a vacant hum under which everything is neatly muffled, all the sounds buried low amongst the mushrooms and the pill bugs and the white rot that leaks from decaying branches. And then, rising from the stillness comes the owl’s great stutter. The sound hangs there, an entity

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  • Fall Light

    1–2 minutes

    The wind parts the leaves like a hand brushing back a curtain, yellow and diaphanous in the low tide of the sun. There they are, the Ash and cottonwood, the young maple, long bands of light tethered in the furrows of their bark. Their leaves are coaxed loose, and they fallas slow as particles of

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