He remembers, vaguely, that once he had hands.

Not the details—those are gone, shed like old skin—but the idea of hands: something that could hold, shuffle, stack. Now he has fins, and fins are not good for holding anything except the river itself. Still, the feeling persists, a ghost memory in his muscles: the rhythm of cards snapping together, the weight of chips, the careful art of not giving anything away.

He is a salmon now. He is very used to being a salmon.

Most days, this is just a fact, like water or gravity or the strangely judgmental otter who lives three rocks downstream. He swims, he eats, he avoids teeth, he follows currents that feel like instructions written in a language under his skin. When the others leap, he leaps. When the others rest in the cold dark between stones, he rests too, though his dreams are crowded with rectangles of color and a green felt table that smells like smoke and regret.

He doesn’t remember his human name. He knows he had one, once, because sometimes a sound bubbles up in his brain, tastes almost right, then dissolves into bubbles before he can catch it. The loss should bother him more than it does. But salmon life is simple, and the river is loud enough to drown out most questions.Except one.

The question arrives the day he sees the Deck.

It happens late in the season, when the water runs colder and the sky presses low on the surface. He’s resting near the riverbed, watching silt drift past like lazy constellations, when a shape appears ahead: flat, rectangular, fluttering down from above. It spins slowly as it sinks, and every instinct screams, This is wrong, this does not belong here, but another voice—older, stranger—whispers, Oh. A card.

It lands on the gravel in front of him, face up.The image is blurred by the water, but there’s a man on it, sitting at a table, three cups in front of him. His smile is too wide, his eyes too kind. The corners of the card bend slightly in the current, like it’s breathing. For reasons he cannot explain, the salmon feels the old itch: the thrill of chance, the hum of risk. Poker. The word arrives intact, solid as a stone.

He remembers Poker.

Not rules, not odds, not strategy—those are scattered, half-eaten thoughts—but the feeling. Long nights under harsh lights. The soft hiss of chips moving across a table. The electric moment when the river card turns over and everyone’s life gets better or worse in one tiny flip of cardboard.The river card.

He laughs, or he would, if fish could laugh without swallowing their own jokes. Of course the river has cards. Of course it does.Over the next few days, more cards appear. One stuck between two stones. One drifting by like a lazy leaf. One lodged in a tangle of roots where the current curls back on itself. Different faces, different suits, but all with that same wrong-right feeling, like memories half-retranslated from another life.

The others don’t notice. Or they pretend not to. Fish are good at pretending nothing is happening.He, however, is not.He starts collecting them, nudging them with his nose into a hidden hollow behind a submerged log. It becomes his secret cave of rectangles, his wet little casino. They’re warped and waterlogged, but he knows, deep in the hazy part of his mind that still smells faintly of cigarette smoke and neon, that you don’t need perfect cards to play. You need belief. You need rules. You need stakes.

And he has stakes. His whole miserable second life feels like one long bad beat.

He has grown tired of being a salmon—not because salmon life is cruel (though it has its moments: hooks, teeth, low oxygen and high expectations) but because he keeps feeling like he’s stuck on the wrong side of the table. Like somewhere, in some other room, at some other table, a dealer is still waiting for him to sit back down.

So he makes a decision.Poker will be his way out.

He doesn’t know what that means, exactly. He imagines, vaguely, that if he plays well enough, if he wins big enough, the river itself will pay him out. Maybe he’ll wake up with hands again, chips digging into his palm, his forgotten human name being called across a room. Maybe he’ll just stop being so painfully aware that he was once something else. Either way, it’s better than drifting.

He begins to practice.

At first it’s ridiculous: a salmon in a cave, lining up soggy cards with his nose, trying to remember what beats what. He assigns roles to nearby stones and drifting leaves. This pebble is a tight player. That piece of twig is a maniac. He plays mock hands against them, trying to read their imaginary tells. He whispers to himself in the flow of the current, half-rules and half-prayers.Pairs. Three of a kind. Full house. All-in.

The missing details don’t matter. What matters is the feeling of the game. The tension. The risk. The tiny flame of hope that says: This hand could change everything.Word spreads, in the strange, silent way things spread underwater. Fish start peeking into his cave, watching the strange one play with his rectangles. Some scoff. Some are curious. One old salmon with clouded eyes lingers a little too long and finally asks, in the way fish ask things, “What are you doing?”“Winning my way out,” he answers.The old salmon tilts his head, as if listening to something far away.“Has anyone ever done that?” he asks.

“Not yet,” the card-playing salmon says. “But odds improve with volume of attempts.

”The phrase feels borrowed from another life, but it fits in his mouth, so he keeps it.

One night—a night so dark the surface is just a rumor—the current changes. It hums low, like the river is shuffling its entire length. The salmon feels it in his bones, in the thin line where his old life ends and his new one never quite began.

The cards in his cave stir.One by one, they lift off the riverbed, not floating up, but dragged sideways, as if the water has discovered a secret direction. They circle him, fluttering, faces flashing faster than he can read them.He realises, with a certainty that makes his scales prickle, that this is it. The game.

A shape coalesces in front of him, made of cards and current and something colder than either. It’s not a person, exactly, but it sits as a person would, across an invisible table. The water between them feels suddenly shallow and endless at the same time.On the riverbed, a neat pile of stones appears where chips should be.His heart pounds. Does he still have a heart? The river doesn’t care.

“Blinds are posted,” the not-quite-voice of the current murmurs in his mind. “Do you buy in?”He thinks of the life he barely remembers: late nights, empty pockets, promises made and broken under buzzing lights. He thinks of this life: cold runs, hungry seasons, a name that never quite surfaces. He thinks of the thing he’s never stopped wanting: a way to feel like he’s at the right table, even just once.

He nudges his pile of stones forward.“All in,” he says.

The current laughs, or maybe that’s just the rapids upstream.

Cards slide toward him. Two settle in the gravel before his nose, faces down. His fins tremble. Behind him, in the darkness of the cave entrance, other fish gather, silent witnesses to a game they don’t understand.

“Your move,” the river says.

He flips the first card.

It’s—The current surges, dragging silt and shadow across the table, obscuring his view. Somewhere above, a branch falls into the water with a thunderous splash, sending a swirl of bubbles spiraling through the cave. The cards whirl, the stones scatter, the watching fish bolt in a flash of silver.

When the water clears, he is alone at the table, staring at the place where his cards should be, heart hammering against the invisible line between lives.

He blinks once.

Twice.

We do not see the cards. We do not hear the outcome. All we know is that, far downstream, where the river curves out of sight, something laughs softly, like someone raking in a pot—or pushing it away.