Free The Spawning Grounds by Gail Anderson-Dargatz

antique bureau—a relic from Eugene Robertson’s time—into a desk for his laptop. He had littered both it and the floor with books, dirty clothes and a mountain of junk food wrappers. A pile of his dirty socks and underwear sat in the corner. But Jesse was stopped in his tracks, struck with nausea, not by this disorder, but by the images Brandon had drawn on the walls. His wife, Elaine, had sketched these same creatures, over and over, in the months before she had taken her own life. Brandon was at work on one now, squatting in the corner of the room to complete a sketch of a fox with human feet.
    “Jesus, Bran.”
    Brandon stood to face his father, charcoal in hand, his blank look unreadable. Behind him, on the wall, the drawing of a crow with the eyes of a woman stared at Jesse.
    “What the hell is going on?” Jesse asked, though he feared he already knew.
    Bran searched his circling thoughts for some explanation that his father would accept. These weren’t all his own thoughts, he knew. Many belonged to another. For a fleeting moment Brandon understood what this other was telling him, but then his awareness fell away, as dreams do once the sleeper wakes.
    “I don’t know,” he said. “Not yet.”
    Then his attention was caught by a flash of water on the wall, a reflection, this pretty thing, catching light. He reached out to touch the mirror, and as one thought skipped across his mind another took its place, one overlapping the other like concentric circles in the water.

— 9 —
Skipping Stones
    ALEX HAD WALKED so quietly through grass and mud to where Hannah waited on Eugene’s Rock that she hadn’t heard him, just felt the warmth that radiated from him as he stood beside her, the shelter his body provided from the cool, late-afternoon breeze. Below her in the water, a sockeye pair prepared to mate in the gravel of the riverbed. The female sockeye had swept the rocks, flicking her body to clear away the algae and silt that might suffocate the eggs she would lay here. The male hovered by the female, stroking her with his whole body, waiting. When she was ready and released her eggs, he quivered, letting loose his milt to swirl within the water, to cover the eggs. He would soon swim away to die, but the female would stay as long as her tail beat, to protect her nest of stone.
    Alex sat down beside Hannah with the old familiarity, close enough that the hairs of his forearms raised goosebumps on the skin of hers. He smelled, faintly, of cigarettes and of the orange he must have just eaten.
    “Got your smoke signal,” he said. When Hannah raised an eyebrow at him, he tapped the cellphone in his jacket pocket.
    Hannah wasn’t sure what to think of these small jokes Alex made. Had the Shuswap even used smoke signals? She figured he was making fun of her, poking holes in the preconceptions he assumed she carried from her white world. Then again, maybe not. He had, after all, reinvented himself during his time away at university; he had distanced himself from his roots, even as he returned to them.
    “So what’s up?” he asked.
    “Jesse finally got back. I was just in town with him and Bran, visiting Grandpa. Christ, Alex, I think Grandpa’s losing it. He says Bran is possessed or something.” She rubbed her knees. “Thing is, Bran seems to think he is too. He’s drawing on his walls. Crazy shit. Animals that are part human.”
    “Like what your mom drew.”
    Hannah glanced away and nodded. “That day we fell in the river, you talked about a water mystery. I thought maybe if I knew what you told Bran I could make him understand it isn’t real. Or maybe you could?”
    Alex shook his head. “I can’t do that. Only he knows what he’s dealing with.”
    Hannah shifted away from him. “What
did
you tell him?”
    “Stew must have told you about Eugene Robertson.”
    “No, not much. Sounds like he was an asshole. He was married to some woman back in England when he took aShuswap wife. Grandpa said he