Briar Ripley Page

@flameswallower.bsky.social

2876 Followers 349 Following

It's Briar! Hi! I'm an American werewolf and writer living in London. Website: briarripleypage.xyz Self-pubbed stuff on flameswallower.itch.io

dark-skinned transmasculine person with short sword/long dagger, dressed in layers of pink and red clothing
Translated from phonetic spelling of a semi-invented future dialect of English, this goes: Eusa said, “Is this a dream?” The little man said, “No.” Eusa said, “Was the other a dream, then? When I had a wife and children?” The little man said, “No, Eusa. That was no dream, and this is no dream. It’s all one thing; you can’t wake up out of it.” Eusa said, “I can die out of it though, can’t I?” The little man said, “Eusa, you die out of this place and you’ll just find me in another place. You’ll find me in the wood, you’ll find me on the water, like you found me in the stone. You look anywhere and I’ll be there.”
photo and drawing collage of a person with sort of a "punk babadook" thing going on juggling several spheres, including their own head, against a colorful, abstract background
rainbow photo collage feat. my husband wearing a monk's robe
a dude with a freaky bat head and a dude with a freaky archosaur head chilling together against a colorful, abstract backdrop
ACROSS THE MARSH and through the trees, off the hiking trail, over the smallest of the hills, looking to collect the last of the late wild garlic and perhaps a bit of other forage, Katie “Bluebell” Whitlow stumbled across a corpse. It was half-hidden by a tangle of blackberry brambles and sundry weeds and wildflowers in a shallow ditch, but the legs stuck out clear as day, almost comical. The old hippie pushed her glasses up on her nose and went closer to make sure she hadn’t happened upon a passed out vagrant. She had not; the body’s torso was a mess of wounds, tacky dried blood making it impossible to tell what color its shirt had originally been. Bluebell bit back a cry. She wasn’t squeamish. She’d caught and killed and gutted fish since she was a little girl, and she’d seen plenty of corpses over the years: alcoholism, cancer, other diseases that ate away at people bit by bit. But this was different. This was a young man, early twenties perhaps, who’d clearly been murdered. The corpse’s unnaturally pale face had shallow wounds carved into the puttylike flesh too, like the killer had playfully doodled on it before leaving the scene. The corpse’s mouth was open unnaturally wide, still screaming.
The law locks up the man or woman Who steals the goose from off the common But leaves the greater villain loose Who steals the common from the goose. The law demands that we atone When we take things we do not own But leaves the lords and ladies fine Who take things that are yours and mine. The poor and wretched don’t escape If they conspire the law to break; This must be so but they endure Those who conspire to make the law. The law locks up the man or woman Who steals the goose from off the common And geese will still a common lack Till they go and steal it back — Anonymous, "The Goose and the Common"
a pink/purple/blue/green/orange collage showing a colorful contortionist and a black and white jesus set like a gem in jewelry
very brightly colored collage landscape with flowers and a swing
a collage box with a grayscale frame decorated by transparent pngs of partly used pill sheets. the remaining white pills are stamped with the word “time.” inside the frame, a blue person lies facedown on a pillow, flanked by two mirrored yellow radios. the person is lying in or falling down a tunnel made of several layered rough ovals extracted from photos
collage featuring a photo of the artist as a child, very bright summer primaries and greens, surrounded by a gold frame and fake vines
very sweaty, hairy, shirtless, tattooed white person wearing sunglasses sitting in beach chair
bright blue air, white clouds, up high
(excerpt from an interview with Nabokov about his novel Lolita) INTERVIEWER He does [names him]. A third critic has said that you “diminish” your characters “to the point where they become ciphers in a cosmic farce.” I disagree; Humbert, while comic, retains a touching and insistent quality—that of the spoiled artist. NABOKOV I would put it differently: Humbert Humbert is a vain and cruel wretch who manages to appear “touching.” That epithet, in its true, tear-iridized sense, can only apply to my poor little girl. Besides, how can I “diminish” to the level of ciphers, et cetera, characters that I have invented myself? One can “diminish” a biographee, but not an eidolon.
bear type person in binder/undershirt and shorts drinking water at night in a room lit by a single aggressively purple lightbulb
Person with medium length, voluminous wavy hair
37 year old pansy
cool guy in kitty cat themed sunglasses (tortoiseshell with ears and whiskers)
Person wearing large, round prescription glasses with black plastic frames that have tiny cat ears and whiskers decorating their outer rims
A person in a bright red tunic or minidress & dark red padded corset top
Person standing, wearing boxer shorts and a red 17th century-esque corset by the designer Koral Sagular
thin bespectacled tattooed person wearing a dark red 16th-17th century-esque corset by the designer Koral Sagular
He was a man of many nations Had a hundred souls and a hundred to go He was a man of many nations Two hearts, two hands, it's a slippery slope He had a fear of being naked But you're any other man in another man's clothes He was a man of many nations With revelations, oh, revelations He wrote a book about the Bible And he wrote a book about men in the sky He wrote a book about the smell of winter Then two, a little less simple to decipher Saying, “I am the water at the foot of the palms Oh, I'm sand and wind and a shitty mirage But either way, I'm a man of many nations!”
Cover of the children’s book “The Stupids Step Out”
Autistic SFF itch.io bundle 34 workss by autistic authors, many with autistic main and side characters. April 1st- April 14th. https://itch.io/b/3598/autistic-sff-a-lil-romance-more
person with medium length/ ear-length brown hair, curling loosely as described in caption
acne-scarred bespectacled white person with medium length wavy brown hair and triple pierced earlobes
The worst and largest omen so far this year— indeed, the worst and largest omen since before Ivy left the farm and her witchiness subsided into the background of her life for a decade— is the legless dead foal in the neighbors’ pasture. Ivy sees it when she’s out checking the fence between their property and her father’s for gaps the goats could get through. (Well. It’s not Ivy’s father’s property anymore. It’s Lillian’s. Lillian’s and, technically, Ivy’s. All the same.) Ivy’s boots crunch to a halt on the frost-coated grass. She climbs up to the midpoint of the wire and chainlink fence to get a better look. The foal, sprawled forsaken on a scabby patch of ground, is white and red. Where legs should be, it just has stubs with slimy tendrils trailing off them, swirling atop the frozen mud. Frost beads its long eyelashes. Its visible eye is fixed on the nothing of heaven. Blank pale sky billowing above the world in all directions like a sheet.
a hand holds a round pink pill, an oblong white pill, and a blue capsule pill
Maggie dreaming of the Whistler again. "That's how Maggie Warner came to believe that the waking world was a mere stage, populated by actors. It was the people behind the scenes who were putting on the show."
In a dreamlike technicolor environment filled with flying fish, the Whistler talks, in shadow, to two people in a room. Outside, with sunflowers and a melting house, he does a magic trick for them. "And he had been convincing people to join him in a mission that Maggie could never remember."
The same man again, standing sinisterly against a wall, drinking a beer, and exploring a pale city with a canal running through it. "The Whistler was boisterous, persuasive, fun-loving, even a little cruel. In her dreams, he journeyed through a city of white sandstone, searching for an item lost to him many years since."
Drawing (b&w) of a woman dreaming that she is a man (in color) standing against a landscape of sea and ruins. "In Maggie Warner's dreams, she was a fat man in a green twill suit. She called him 'the Whistler.'"
selfie wearing small, realistic fake horns
a purple collage of my drawings, my photographs, cut out images from other sources, and digital manipulation. Also heavily features green. Two women stand in a landscape
a red collage of my drawings, my photographs, cut out images from other sources, and digital manipulation. Kind of gory looking.
an episode of the twilight zone called "the chaser," with the synopsis "a man, desperate to win the affection of a beautiful woman, slips her a love potion."
Two black and white cats lying close together on a bed
self, just shaved and with a recent haircut
Sketch felt like he had a hidden fire, too. It wasn’t a good thing. His bones were sulfur and phosphorus. They rubbed against each other in red-hot pain and sent forth sparks that lit up every nerve in his body. His brain roared. His mouth filled up with ash. He couldn’t stay still or stop yelling. The only things that helped smother the blaze were booze and pills. Whenever he asked a doctor for help, they just tried to make him take different pills that didn’t work as well. Or they told him to channel it into art, or moving heavy crates around a warehouse, or something else “productive”. Fuck that, was Sketch’s opinion. Productivity had caused the mine fire in the next town over. Productivity was melting Antarctica. Productivity burned the world up. Sketch knew that destruction was in his nature, and he wanted to destroy exclusively on his own terms. And, hopefully, without hurting too many other people.
neon-hued person with glasses wearing a fuzzy towel, euphoric on a swing
thirties white guy with longish hair in a ponytail and a fairly bushy goatee
fat Black (well, purple) psychedelic female wizard holding a crystal-topped staff and standing in a demure, graceful pose
I like to go: Down by the old railway. It used to be a noisy place, But now it is silent; There are no noises; No clanking of machinery; No screams and laughs of terror and joy; But prehaps; There is the ghost of a train there; And at night; It comes out; And moves along the track; Clickerty Clack; Clickerty Clack. The Old Railway
Gay guys in suits
A noir with trans main characters that isn’t primarily About transness!!!! Generally guarded lesbian tattoo artist Tian is in something of an emotional funk when she stumbles upon Al, a gambling savant who makes his living in the underground world of high-stakes competitive mahjong, getting the shit kicked out of him by some mob goons in a parking lot. Once the goons depart, she helps him up and takes him back to her apartment. From there, an unlikely friendship forms— a close enough friendship for Tian to get kidnapped in order to provide motivation for Al during an important mahjong game. A simple story, with a Lynchian sense of strangeness and disorienting mystery that comes partly from the eccentricities of the characters, and partly from the fact that it is told out of chronological order. I really liked Al and Tian and the ways in which they came to know and rely on one another, which gave the book an oddly heartwarming, uplifting quality despite its downbeat tone and often dark subject matter.
famous drawing of the author Alexander Dumas in his twenties. despite his unfashionably thin calves, he is SMOKING
collage of photos, glitter, and drawing of religious statue
collage of photos and two drawings based on images of saints I saw in Italy
surreal collage of photos and drawn figures. lots of green, plants & moon.
guy with new glasses
psychedelic collage illustration featuring a dancing person of ambiguous gender. the area around their chest and lower torso has been scribbled out with dark marker.
unsettling collage illustration featuring a face made out of flowers
a black and white fluffy cat sitting on a laptop keyboard
an aggressively purple collage illustration with a creepy, slightly abstract vibe. includes orchids, statue parts, and a photo of a hallway in a condemned building.
30 something white guy with glasses and curly brown hair selfie