Author: melaniesusans

(Read at Tell-All, January 2019) Men like my father are a dime a dozen.  You pass by them many times in a week, but they may as well be invisible. If you stopped to observe, you’d see them cruising the morning-damp streets before dawn pinks the sky. You’d see them mount behemoth machines and hear the…

(An excerpt from Wisdom: A Love Story) It was the third week in April, when warmed soil breathed like decanted wine.  Color was returning to the land after a long winter, and the swelling and stiffness, where six months before a neurosurgeon had cut open the back of my skull, had mostly disappeared. I should…

(Published in summer 2018 issue of Fredericksburg Literary and Arts Review) Few of us would deny that death is a loss.  Sometimes, however, death is a welcome unburdening, and not just because it ends physical pain or infirmity.  Death has the power to strip away inauthentic suffering and reveal compelling truths, if we are clear-eyed…