Fuchsia walls press into your back, spurring you toward the plunge. The end of a winter that has learned your name.
Like a strobe light, Polaroid flashbulbs catch your face mid-wince, mid-wonder.
Your thoughts bloom pink, then bruise. Sprout, husk, blossom, blight. None take root in the soil of your solitude.
Days fold shut behind the moving walls.
The plunge approaches. Some part of you still calls it escape.
Spring? Or only winter teasing green?
A treetop opens below you, but with paper-dead leaves.
“Come alive,” you command, wringing the dead for birth.
The leaves only turn aquamarine.
Among the glacial erratics and waist-high stone walls of central New England, Ryan resurrects antique typewriters and drafts fiction on their glass-and-chrome keys. Ryan's stories explore memory, longing, and the uncanny edges of ordinary life. Ryan's work has appeared in Litbreak Magazine, Literally Stories, Idle Ink, and The Rock Salt Literary Journal. Ryan has received honorable mentions in the Writers of the Future contest and posts occasional dispatches from the typewriter frontier on Bluesky at @iviesofinkribbons.