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flameswallower.bsky.social
Briar Ripley Page
@flameswallower.bsky.social
2.6K followers 340 following 5.6K posts
It's Briar! Hi! I'm an American werewolf and writer living in London.

Website: briarripleypage.xyz

Self-pubbed stuff on flameswallower.itch.io
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flameswallower.bsky.social
Tucker!!!!!
Once concepts of sex and gender collapse, there’s no way you can be righteous within the old binaries: male-female, man-woman. The wreckage of the system will always be messy. You continue to negotiate each step, you navigate along the horizon, but you realize you can never be good because there are no rules by which you are judged. The demand for moral purity conditions people to see transness/queerness as a category violation. You were told you need to remain morally pure, yet when you stare into the quivering deviant matter you see there’s no way to accomplish it. There’s no net on the tennis court, and no god is keeping score. Now what? You don’t know. That’s why you’re hurting. You blame trans people for blowing up reality and replacing it with soup. But reality was already soup. Trans people just helped you to see it and prompted you to come to terms with it. (You’re welcome.)
November 21, 2025 at 3:11 PM
flameswallower.bsky.social
kind of a thirst trap, but really meant to show off my hair
damp person in a bathroom with curly brown hair, a short beard, and a spacy expression
November 18, 2025 at 7:23 PM
flameswallower.bsky.social
once more!
Briar Ripley Page Awards Eligible Fiction 2025 Collection: Lupus in Fabula Short stories: "Gorgonland" (Lupus in Fabula) "Her Reflection" (And One Day We Will Die)
November 13, 2025 at 8:53 PM
flameswallower.bsky.social
Ok
bespectacled white guy with short, gelled wavy hair bespectacled white guy with short, gelled wavy hair bespectacled white guy with short, gelled wavy hair bespectacled white guy with short, gelled wavy hair
November 13, 2025 at 5:19 PM
flameswallower.bsky.social
all the first sentences from this collection of stories
November 11, 2025 at 5:11 PM
flameswallower.bsky.social
collage:
a purple collage illustration I made for this chapter of my story, featuring a person holding a mirror frame encircling a canid's mouth (I think) where their face should be.
November 3, 2025 at 4:52 PM
flameswallower.bsky.social
Love Poem: kairos
He was struck by me, so struck he had to run across the store and introduce himself with a magic trick. I myself was struck by the attention. Sometimes by the kindness. Sometimes by an unexpected lust or pity swelling, crashing down upon me in an explosion of foam. I don’t know if he saw that wave of emotion in me. Or what he saw, what struck him. He was skinny. No, he was fat. Tall, short, pink, brown, old, young. Red hair, shaved head, lank and oily curls of no particular color. Stubble. Hideous breath. I don’t remember his face. Maybe I never saw it. He put me in handcuffs. I said I’d do it with anybody. This was true in spirit, though not in practice. We never touched. We fucked in the shower. We made out in front of the whole party. Neither of us remembers what happened, so maybe nothing happened at all. He told me to read a specific book. Then I had to leave because his girlfriend was coming home. The whole time he’d kept saying “I’m engaged to a beautiful woman and this is wrong.” He had no one and nobody. I practically forced myself on him, I guess. I didn’t know how else to stop his pain.
November 2, 2025 at 9:30 PM
flameswallower.bsky.social
another factual series of events (different parties, though)
Love Poem: long ago, in another country We were running across an earth that seemed too flat, trying out new names for each other. She and I collapsed beneath a glowing green dinosaur held up to the black sky on two metal poles. We put out our cigarettes against each others’ naked thighs. I could already taste the breakup. I could already taste how it would feel when I threw up later. Her smile was small and slow, her eyes like imagined distant planets. Make no mistake: this is a happy memory.
November 2, 2025 at 7:21 PM
flameswallower.bsky.social
Love Poem: a factual series of events
When we start the game, we each die quick at the same time. Next try, you agree to join a cult; paranoid, I want to get a gun. The only gun I can find is cursed, and has no bullets. It’s unclear to me what the curse is, exactly. Was the start of the curse in the gun, or in my desire for the gun? Meanwhile, with the cult, you discover an un-cursed gun, which is loaded. Unfortunately, you’re a pacifist. Then the cult cuts off your trigger finger. Elsewhere, you kiss a revolutionary. I flee the bar with a stranger before something terrible happens. You make choices you think could be better. Game people can’t stop asking me what kind of an idiot carries a cursed gun with no bullets. In the end, I can’t sacrifice someone else to save myself. I lose control. You gain the ability to see twice as many colors. You lose control, too. Our controllers recede like lost islands. The door to another place, it turns out, was in the laundry room this whole time, only nobody ever bothered to use it before. Who would even go down there?
November 1, 2025 at 10:33 PM
flameswallower.bsky.social
🔑🔑🔑
person with gold-tinted dark brown and green/bleached hair person with gold-tinted dark brown and green/bleached hair
October 30, 2025 at 6:36 PM
flameswallower.bsky.social
The thing about me coming out is, I looked like This as a teenager. Some people thought I mostly liked boys, but found it strange in a way they couldn’t or didn’t quite articulate. Some people thought I was a lesbian, even though I never claimed to be one.
The world’s most obvious egg. Just looks like an insecure, spindly boy with chapstick and tits. I thought I looked like a girl, albeit a really ugly one.
October 28, 2025 at 7:56 PM
flameswallower.bsky.social
This was a hoot.
Max: The final frontier of journalism: the inscrutable gay guy.
October 26, 2025 at 9:08 AM
flameswallower.bsky.social
the time Oliver Sacks had the DTs (sorry, no energy to transcribe as alt text)
October 11, 2025 at 8:40 PM
flameswallower.bsky.social
big curl from yesterday
An unusually large and tight (for my normally wavy hair) ringlet curl that formed on one side of my head An unusually large and tight (for my normally wavy hair) ringlet curl that formed on one side of my head An unusually large and tight (for my normally wavy hair) ringlet curl that formed on one side of my head An unusually large and tight (for my normally wavy hair) ringlet curl that formed on one side of my head
October 2, 2025 at 1:43 PM
flameswallower.bsky.social
oh yeah, here's the collage I made for it
Difficult to describe collage of photos and drawings, with flowers, pink glitter, severed heads (some spitting flame), and a wavering door.
October 1, 2025 at 5:48 PM
flameswallower.bsky.social
A sleeping black and white cat with his mouth open A sleeping black and white cat with his mouth open and tongue protruding
September 30, 2025 at 9:50 AM
flameswallower.bsky.social
thank you for this storygraph review, dale!!

check out the book here: flameswallower.itch.io/misery-loves
Storygraph review of Misery Loves from user stromberg: This brief novella reads like a supernatural murder ballad, entangling a heartbroken and music-obsessed man, the sister of a half-forgotten indie musician, a jealous and vindictive necromancer, and three unhappy souls whose flight from life merely traps them in stasis, unable to change, learn, or grow. Like much of Page’s work, the story delves not only into the horrific but moreso into the difficult. Death means you can never become anyone else.
September 26, 2025 at 6:48 PM
flameswallower.bsky.social
I’ve been mending things in an interesting way lately
Jean shorts with patchwork mending and embroidery, on my body Other jean shorts with patchwork mending and embroidery, off my body Other jean shorts with patchwork mending and embroidery, off my body (butt side)
September 15, 2025 at 7:55 PM
flameswallower.bsky.social
so glad I still subscribe to the mailing list for the redacted county wildlife rescue center even after living in england for four years
A picture of a bald eagle flying triumphantly out of a cage held by a wildlife rehabilitator or volunteer. The caption reads "It was a lovely day to release a bald eagle on the anniversary of 9/11." This made me laugh really hard. (I am stoned.)
September 13, 2025 at 9:35 PM
flameswallower.bsky.social
my husband said “whoa, you look like Aragorn right now!” then quickly added “I mean, if he bathed”
White person with chin/clavicle length wavy dark hair and a scruffy stubble beard
September 13, 2025 at 8:40 PM
flameswallower.bsky.social
great interview all around! hal is probably one of the most politically astute queer YA writers working right now (not that I’m really up on the YA scene). more importantly, ze has Correct Vampire Opinions
Vampires means blood drinking. I wanted to write about the sort of desire that holds people together, even if they’re very dissimilar. I also think fear of contagion and fear of monstrosity animate a lot of the right-wing narratives about queer and trans people. So it’s always fertile ground for making very direct comparisons in terms of people hunting down our communities and attacking them and trying to kill people, and our communities not being set up to withstand such a constant onslaught, even if we have lived in the margins for a long time.
September 13, 2025 at 9:28 AM
flameswallower.bsky.social
The mascot should be as upsetting as, though not identical to, this guy. The goth can be nonbinary I guess
A horrifying droopy mascot outfit
September 12, 2025 at 9:07 AM
flameswallower.bsky.social
new novella chapter up on Patreon! for less than two bucks per month, you can read this tale of giant addictive psychedelic supernatural plants, mad science, and college club kids!

www.patreon.com/posts/138041...
A colorful collage of magazine images to illustrate this chapter of Fairyland, with glitter, flower petals, body parts, etc.
September 3, 2025 at 4:07 PM
flameswallower.bsky.social
written down so as not to keep annoying people verbally about it
Alison Rumfitt thoughts/praise - I love how ambitious and experimental in structure and language use her novels get, especially for novels marketed as genre horror; typically you only see this stuff in postmodern literary fiction - I think she’s nearly a decade younger than me, and I am not old?? She wrote two amazing novels in her early to mid-twenties! That’s so rare and such an accomplishment, and it makes me eager to see how she’ll develop both stylistically and philosophically if she chooses to continue writing and publishing into her 30s, 40s, 50s, and beyond. Though if she’s one of those early blooming talents who ends up more or less retired from writing by the time they’re 35, that’s chill, too. (Assuming the reason for the retirement is desire, not circumstantial constraints.) - Probably the most incisive and uncomfortably grimy/honest yet compassionate descriptions of transmasc egg/closeted interiority ever penned by a non-transmasculine person - I think Brainwyrms is better than Tell Me I’m Worthless, but I think it doubles down on potentially audience-alienating and “difficult” elements in a way that makes its status as emergent cult classic rather than ultra high profile hit pretty inevitable
September 2, 2025 at 3:40 PM
flameswallower.bsky.social
I've got two books in here!
He needed time to be completely alone with his songs and his thoughts, time to abandon all pretense and let himself blur into the soft, smoky light of his room, all refracted through the stained glass mobile he'd made in an elective class his senior year of high school. Gold and teal and green, the world at the bottom of a bottle at the bottom of the river. His first album had been inspired by that light, by the calm and safety and solitude in his little apartment. His second and third albums, of course, were all about Lilac. She was a more tumultuous muse, sure, but a better one. She'd introduced him to emotions he hadn't known existed. She understood him in ways he hadn't known another person could. Even when she screamed, even when she hated him. Even when he hated her. They were like that ancient Greek story, two halves of one androgynous creature. In bed they flowed into and over each other until Storm thought he could feel himself through Lilac's nerves, could feel his body as a woman's body, held down, penetrated. She'd straddle him and he'd see her not as a small, soft girl but as a snarling creature or a strong man with corded muscles and the wings of a demon. He'd feel her as the wind, himself as the litter-studded fields of wildflowers that bent to its will. They were rivers in motion, coming together and branching apart, shaping and dividing the city. We make small repairs on the tanks and tank-attachment hardware as needed; these have been ramping up a little bit each work season for the past several years. Things at the station are falling apart. It's harder to hire technicians, we hear, and harder to get new parts. Things aren't going well anywhere on Earth. We hear whispers of plague, and riots, and depleted mineral resources. We hear that the satellite dwellers don't want to sink more money into any terrestrial Station when everyone knows that the future of this project, the future of all humanity and commerce and medical science, is on the Moon and Mars. We listen to the guards talk about it in quiet voices as they laze around the wide, circular automatic doors that lead out of the amniastasis preservation corridors. Besides chatting with each other, the guards mostly play cards or dick around on the net through their headsets all day long. (We're not allowed open net access. Wild rumors abound re: what we'd find if we could go online, both in terms of solar system news and in terms of niche pornography.) You might not think that anyone could relax that much with so many yards of warped, bobbing flesh, as carefully cultivated as bonsai, stretching out in every direction. But Jenny or John or guard, if you work here, you get used to it. Eventually. You more or less get used to it. Illustration from Misery Loves, by me Cover of Body After Body, by Tom Horstmann
August 23, 2025 at 4:38 PM