Live Encounters Poetry & Writing 16th Anniversary Volume Three
November- December 2025
Little Stories, stories by Fred Everett Maus.
1
My father spent his last month in a hospital bed. I was in graduate school. As soon as the semester ended I joined my mother in Dallas. One or the other of us, or both, were with my father all day, every day.
My mother was organized and stoical through most of this. Twice, though, sitting in the armchair in the corner of the hospital room, she wept uncontrollably, silently, her body small and crumpled, flat against the back of the large chair – tears and tears and tears. The first time was when my father had a birthday during his hospital stay. A group of nurses came in and sang “Happy Birthday,” smiling at us. I smiled back; it was a break in the long, sad days. Then I looked over at my mother and saw her weeping, inconsolable on her husband’s last birthday.
Later, there was a day when my mother and I woke up and had breakfast together. Usually, we started the day with quiet joy at being together but on this day, uncharacteristically, she was abrupt and critical. Why was breakfast taking so long? Why wasn’t I dressed already? Why hadn’t we left? When we reached the hospital, my mother disappeared for a few minutes, and then returned, to sit in her chair weeping for the rest of the day. She had not told me until then: it was time for the doctors to do some tests to determine whether the chemotherapy was helping my father. My mother knew that the doctors would be ready to tell her the results of the tests as soon as we arrived at the hospital. There was no good news that day, or any day afterward.
2
I was driving home, and I forgot about the concert and its conversations, and about the cool night air. I knew what I would do as soon as I got home. My boyfriend had broken up with me three weeks before. Now I sent him an email message every evening. I never got a response, but I was sure they were being read. I wanted to start formulating sentences as I drove, but my sense of tonight’s message was still vague. I wanted all my messages to hurt Hal, and I wanted every message to be different. And I wanted them to be somehow beautiful, to bring my suffering in the direction of art. I wanted to show myself as special, as someone who was for Hal a terrible missed opportunity.
Sometimes I would describe some aspect of my day, something that would evoke for Hal the time we were together. I had to make the events I described special and enviable, while also conveying that they were suffused with pain. Tonight, I might write about the concert. “Dear Hal, it feels so strange to go to a beautiful concert by myself.” Or about dinner, but I wasn’t sure I could make a plate of pasta with canned tomato sauce sound enviable; nor was it abjectly pitiful. It would make my life sound boring. Could that be a good approach? “Dear Hal, without you, my life has no flavor, no resonance. It just continues.” Since I was boring myself with this idea, I didn’t think it had much potential for any effect I wanted to have on Hal.
I was a little surprised to be at home—lost in letter-writing deliberations, I drove semiconsciously but, I guess, safely. I sat at my desk, looked at the computer, and remembered the bottle of wine in the kitchen. Several actually. I started to stand up and then sat down again. After my first week of drinking and writing messages to Hal, I had decided to write sober and had mostly succeeded.
Tonight, though, I felt as though a strong transparent barrier stood between me and the keyboard. I thought that a glass of wine might help. My body was tense, as though I was listening for the presence of an intruder; my breathing was shallow. Who was I hurting by writing these messages?
I remembered, yet again, how after my first angry message, Hal had written back—his only reply in these three weeks. “We’re both upset and hurt, and I think it’s best if we don’t communicate until we calm down.” This infuriated me. It was presumptuous for him to tell me what to do. And I was upset and hurt, but the breakup was his doing, and I didn’t want to hear about his sadness. If he didn’t like breaking up, he didn’t have to do it! He sometimes seemed to be unable to think the simplest thoughts. I was getting agitated. I went to get the wine.
I still hadn’t figured out what to write. I thought back to some of my other messages. There was a long one where I listed moments, maybe thirty of them, when we had been especially happy together. Another long one listed exciting sexual things we had done together. Walking on the beach after dark, the same beach that had been so crowded during the day, now so still. The slight breeze, the salty smell. With no warning, Hal bent over and pulled his pants down.
I was surprised, but happy to take him, both of us excited, the light of the half-moon catching the sweat on our pale bodies, our sex sounds duetting with the waves. My message told of many other sexual events. Writing the message had turned me on, and even though I was quite drunk, passing out nearly, I masturbated after I sent it, and then wondered whether my written words would have the power to extract one more orgasm from Hal. Was I running out of ideas now? Maybe more wine. I still hadn’t hit on tonight’s perfect message. I felt empty.
So, I told myself—now taking on my persona as an experienced teacher—write about depletion. That’s what you have, so that’s what you can write about.
Dear Hal,
I am home alone, unless you count the bottle of wine. Is it boring to say that I miss you? Or: I miss our life together. Or: I miss life. In a moment the wine bottle will be as empty as I am. I hope you feel better than I do.
I reread the message and thought: this is a first, I’ve just said how I feel without trying to calculate an effect on Hal. Then I thought: if this doesn’t get to him, I don’t know what will. My pure honest pain. I sent it.
I leaned back in the chair and settled into my familiar thoughts. It was wrong of Hal to break up without talking to me about it. We needed to make the decision together. It was worse that he went to the other side of the country, barely communicated with me, and then broke up in a text message—poorly worded so that I had to read it three times to be sure I understood it. He could have learned something about writing from me. After an unbroken year of living together, it was all right that he wanted to visit his parents and what seemed to be an extensive group of family friends, back in that small town in Oregon. It was all right that he stayed for a month. It was not all right to inform me abruptly that he wasn’t coming back.
The next morning I was surprised to find two empty wine bottles in the kitchen.
© Fred Everett Maus
Fred Everett Maus is a musician, writer, and teacher. They teach music classes on a range of topics, for example a recent course on “Music in Relation to Sexuality and Disability” and a recurring contemplative course “Deep Listening.” They are a trained teacher of mindfulness meditation and Deep Listening, and a student of music therapy and object relations psychoanalysis. They have published prose memoir, poetry, and fiction, for instance in Citron Review, Palette Poetry, Roanoke Review, Vox Populi, and Live Encounters Poetry & Writing. They live in a house in the woods north of Charlottesville, Virginia, and in Roma Norte, Mexico City. The Oxford Handbook of Music and Queerness, which they co-edited with the late Sheila Whiteley, was published in 2022. The Handbook received the 2023 Philip Brett Award for “exceptional musicological work in the field of gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender/transsexual studies.”