The Spawning Grounds by Gail Anderson-Dargatz

aren’t
your
stories.”
    Gina placed the sandwiches on the table and sat.
    “I think we need to take him to a psychiatrist,” Jesse said. “Have him assessed.”
    “You’re not taking him to see a shrink.” Hannah looked from Jesse to Gina. “You don’t know him. Neither of you know him.”
    “Hannah, we’ve already been through all this, with your mother,” Gina said, then reached across the table, took Jesse’s hand and held it a moment before letting go.
    Hannah turned her back on them and braced herself on the counter. “I do remember,” she said. “I was here too.”
    “I know,” Jesse said quietly. He saw his daughter’s face reflected, distorted, in the electric kettle on the counter in front of her. Jesse had used that same kettle to make cups of tea for Elaine and had asked Hannah to carry them into theliving room, where her mother sat drugged and alone in the captain’s chair, staring out the window that overlooked the river and the reserve. Elaine took the cups Hannah offered without saying thanks or even acknowledging her daughter. Her eyes remained unblinking on the river or something beyond. Jesse had once watched Hannah bend in front of her mother so Elaine was forced to look into her face. Elaine startled and, for a moment, focused on Hannah. Elaine’s eyes were bloodshot and confused as if she had just been woken from a dream. Then she shifted the captain’s chair so she could look past Hannah, to the cliff. Hannah had hugged her anyway. Elaine had not hugged her back.
    Hannah opened the cupboard under the sink and pulled out a wash bucket and scrubby, before filling the bucket with warm soapy water. “You come waltzing in here like you own the place,” she said to Gina, though Jesse knew she was also talking to him. “You act like you’re part of this family. You’re not. You don’t know shit.” She lifted the bucket from the sink and headed through the dining room.
    “What are you doing?” Jesse asked her. When she didn’t answer, he followed her, took her arm and made her turn to him. “I said, what are you doing?”
    Hannah yanked her arm from her father’s grip, sloshing water on the floor, and carried the bucket through the living room and up to Brandon’s room.
    “Let her be,” Gina told Jesse.

    Brandon was huddled in the corner of his bed with his sketchbook on his lap, drawing with frantic strokes. The floor and walls of the room were covered with pictures of animals in various stages of transformation, human into animal, animal into human. Hannah took down one, then another and another, crumpling them and dropping them to the floor, to reveal the drawings he’d sketched right on the wall.
    Brandon jumped up. “What are you doing?”
    In answer, Hannah pulled the scrubby from the bucket, squeezed the water from it and started washing the wall.
    “You can’t do that. This is my artwork.”
    “People don’t draw on walls.”
    “Of course they do. Graffiti, right? And this is my room.”
    “You’re not doing this, Bran.” She lowered her voice. “Dad and Gina want to take you to a psychiatrist.”
    “No fucking way.”
    “Then quit acting like a nutcase. And stop dressing like a hobo. Put on some shoes when you go outside. For Christ’s sake, aren’t you wearing underwear? You can see everything.”
    Brandon looked down at his dirty feet, the outline of his genitals in his sweats. “Underwear don’t feel right,” he said. “Shoes hurt or something.”
    “What do you mean they hurt? You outgrew them?”
    “No—I don’t know.”
    “I’ll get you some new runners.”
    “I don’t need any.”
    “Boots then. You’ll need them for winter.”
    “I can’t feel the ground when I wear shoes. I feel like I’m floating, not attached to myself.”
    “Floating?”
    Brandon picked up a charcoal pencil, wiped the wall with his sleeve and redrew the lines that Hannah had just scrubbed away.
    “Stop that.” Hannah took the charcoal from his hand and