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<\/a>Nate Liederbach\u2019s collection, Beasts You\u2019ll Never See<\/em>, begins:<\/p>\nWhen our youngest sister went anorexic at twenty-nine her cheeks sprouted mold-white peach hair, her gums grayed, her auburn mane scraggled dull and spit clumps, yet we couldn\u2019t mention it.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
A beast?<\/p>\n
The story is titled, \u201cDaddy Bird.\u201d And from its opening the story sways equal parts between warm family holiday tale and proscribed unmentionable rage. Until the end that is, when at a theater on Christmas Eve, nervous sibling affection uncorks on a stranger with sudden violence before the movie trailers can even give way to the \u201cBrokeback Mountain<\/em>, 9:05 screening.\u201d<\/p>\n
The narrator, big brother to Erin the anorexic, as well as step-in dad\u2014Daddy Bird\u2014for a father dead too soon, has a temper, self-described: \u201c\u2026my temper is terrible. My temper is so spit-filled and sudden, so biblically prodigal it scares even me. Wets my armpits and I condense. But I love my temper too.\u201d<\/p>\n
But it isn\u2019t Daddy Bird who uncorks.<\/p>\n
This story, along with the others in this collection, is a frenzied dance of language managing a delicate tiptoe along the fracture line of the beautiful and the grotesque. Not a single character walks a common path here. But isn\u2019t that true of the world? Of our neighbor? Of our sister? Our spouse? We all tiptoe to keep the beasts, our own beasts, asleep and behind us.<\/p>\n
Zig. We hire a new guy, Zig. Just Zig, short for nothing. I tell Zig of Mike, but Zig\u2019s the type of ubiquitous one-upper who\u2019s haunted me since grade school. His sister, he claims, has a tail. He\u2019s saying, \u201cGreat, eyelids, sure, but my sister, well her tailbone, understand, it kept growing. Bro, she wags<\/em> it, so this ain\u2019t no spina bifida. Don\u2019t think it\u2019s spina bifida, Bro.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
In \u201cWe Have Trajectories\u201d there seems to be no driving force for the narrative beyond the anecdotes<\/em> of oddities that occupy the narrator\u2019s workaday life: an inverted goldfish, eyelids that never stop growing, Zig\u2019s sister\u2019s wagging tail, the line-cook\u2019s roommate: \u201c\u2018My roommate in college, well this boy only shit once a month<\/em>.\u2019\u2026 He holds up his fingers, and he\u2019s only got nine and a nub. \u2018But this turd \u2026\u2019 He closes one fist, sets the other over his heart. \u2018This turd, this single turd, coal-black, size of an acorn. I swear it.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
The narrator keeps one important anecdote to himself: He has a son he doesn\u2019t know. That no one knows.<\/p>\n
One-upmanship.<\/p>\n
In Beasts,<\/em> learned namedropping occurs a lot, including philosophers. Everyone is reading Nietzsche. Or Kant. Or their spouse is deep in Heidegger, or an old friend\u2014lots of old friends pop up\u2014is recommending Siddhartha<\/em>:<\/p>\n
\u201cOne of those Oprah books?”<\/p>\n
“No, man, old, older. Published in 1951, the year we were born! Siddhartha, he listened to the river, found peace that had no name, lost his own name.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
In \u201cDick the Fourth\u201d a sixty-something man confronts mortality when his father, the Third, lies in a hospital bed, and an old high school chum stops him in the parking lot. This friend, Tang, wants to reminisce and get Dick to tell him stories, \u201ccracks,\u201d from the old days\u2014 in particular one story about adolescent sex on the Third\u2019s living room floor with \u201cBloomers,\u201d Sarah Bloom, which dad interrupts. Dick the Fourth obliges:<\/p>\n
\u201cOh boy, and I was on top of her just pounding away–\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cYeah, there was a lot to pound away at!\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd Dad, well he hears something and gets up, comes downstairs and flips on the living room light, and Bloomers just freaks out. Dad, he\u2019s all flustered, and just saying, \u2018Oops. Sorry ma\u2019am. So sorry ma\u2019am,\u2019 and turns off the light and goes back to bed\u2014\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cSorry, ma\u2019am!\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
The Third gives the Fourth a talking to the next day, with all the requisite warnings of men he knew having \u201csex diseases so bad they pissed themselves, had to wear diapers at forty\u2014.\u201d<\/p>\n
Then he leaves. \u201cBut a second later, he peeks his head in. \u2018Hey,\u2019 he says, and when I look up, he winks. \u2018Son,\u2019 he says, \u2018you were really pourin\u2019 the coal to her!\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
And Tang howls at the telling: \u201cThat\u2019s it! Oh that\u2019s it, man! That\u2019s the story!\u201d<\/p>\n
And it is like that for the reader. \u201cThat\u2019s the story!\u201d Liederbach tells a story.<\/p>\n
In \u201cThe Roads Amputated the Legs,\u201d two college English professors, one young up-and-coming, the other dying of a brain tumor and confused, face mortality. One, from the loss of his mentor, the other from the loss of everything. The up-and-comer is wondering at the demise of his own distinction built from the help of the older man. Who is he without his coach? What does it mean?<\/p>\n
“Doesn\u2019t matter though, see,\u201d [confides the younger]. \u201cNo, it can\u2019t mean\u2013it is<\/em> meaning. Felt. And that\u2019s<\/em> prose. Showing and Telling drop their distinction, and the writing knows for itself, of itself, and its self is universal\u2026\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
What do we make of this as reader? What does it mean? Should<\/em> it mean? In the end, it doesn\u2019t matter. The world of this collection is fraught with beasts most will empathize with, because in their subtle form we don\u2019t see that they are lurking among us, within us.<\/p>\n
In perhaps the most ambitious story of the collection, \u201cThe Distance,\u201d a hapless father, Sam, divorced from his wife, Keri, and weekend warrior-enabler for his fifteen-year-old daughter, Isabelle\u2014Iz, \u201cThe Izzue,\u201d \u201cDaughter,\u201d\u2014 grapples with his role. Too hip to be real. Too afraid to not be hip. Sam dizzies his Daughter and reader with language:<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Let\u2019s see, closing arguments. Hm, well, I\u2019ll present the case of Ash. That\u2019s what I\u2019ll do, got it? Then what you\u2019ll<\/em> do is finish your over-priced oats and organic cow juice. And, after that, well you\u2019ll kindly scrap that incendiary frippery strapped, without a single critical thought, to your burgeoning bosom.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
<\/p>\n
Iz plays along but just \u2026 can\u2019t. \u201c\u2018Man,\u2019 she groans, \u2018like ten percent is funny, but the rest of what leaves your mouth is, like, I mean, Dad, it\u2019s like practically porno\u2014incendiary frippery<\/em>? You\u2019re not funny. Not at all.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
The story dodges between third-person and first-person point of view. Time is fractured, folded over, repeated, projected. It is a domestic twelve-round brawl to read. Impossible to not look away. It scrapes along with below-the-belt hooks and eye gouging with no referee to step in. Mother, father, exes, parents, Daughter.<\/p>\n
\u201c\u2026What of all the truly astounding conversations we\u2019ve had on our weekends together?\u201d [the father says]. \u201cYou\u2019re no reactionary floosy\u2013\u201c<\/p>\n
\u201cYou mean like mom.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cNo. Or I mean me \u2026 too. Me especially<\/em>. \u2026 Plumbing the failure of words, the beauty of abstraction. How making oneself the arbiter of others is to turn oneself into little more than a brittle measuring stick\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cBecause I don\u2019t take it so seriously, Father, not as you\u2013\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIz, Love, Honey, I want you to be proud of your parents\u2019 tensions, their struggles, their divorce. Is that<\/em> insincere? Is it\u2026\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Who knows exactly where the beasts are, even though Liederbach seems to put them behind every page of this slyly startling collection. Or, as reader, as passive participant in what we may interpret and recognize from our own lives in these pages, must we also confess some of our own culpability for putting the beasts there?<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Beasts You’ll Never See<\/em>
\nNate Liederbach
\nNoemi Press
\n2015
\n$15<\/p>\nNate Liederbach is the author of Doing a Bit of Bleeding, Negative Spaces and Beasts You’ll Never See (winner of the 2014 Noemi Press Fiction Award). Among other honors, his writing has received the Academy of American Poets’ Larry Levis Prize , the Atlantic Monthly College Nonfiction Prize, a Best New Poets inclusion, and the Utah Original Writing Competition’s Short Fictin Award. He lives in Olympia, Washington.<\/em><\/p>\n