Ben Marcus, from "The Father Costume"

My father's costumes were gray and long and of the finest pile, sometimes clear enough for us to see through, though there was no reason to look too closely at that man's body. He preferred not to move. He was not one for excursions. My brother and I accomplished most of the required motion for him: we collected and described the daily food, oiled the Costume Gun, gathered yarn each morning after a storm, and donated any leftover swatches of fabric into our mother's kill hole out on the back platform.

At most, my father would throw handfuls of our mother's fabrics in the morning and study how they fell, diagrams in cloth that could have meant anything. His body was hunched and foreign. He grimaced with each gesture, his face often partially adorned with cotton bracings. When the disarray proved baffling to him, he brought in my brother for consultations. I sat on the bench and watched them crouch at their work. I could not read fabric. I had a language problem. My brother spoke a language called Forecast. It consisted of sounds he barked into a stippled leather box. When my father wrapped my brother's hands in cotton waffling, my brother could tap out a low-altitude language on the floor, short thuds of speech that my father held his listening jar to. On the short nights when the sky was stretched too tight and the birds struck against it like pebbles on our roof, my brother slept off his Forecast expulsions in a sling hanging from our door. He cried softly inside his mesh bag while I dotted our windowsills with listening utensils, in case a message came in the night.