If a Salmon Could Speak

If a salmon could speak, you still wouldn't understand me. You would hear vowels and miss the cold tug of current, the taste of gravel between my gills, the humming magnet under my skin that points me home. I don't tell stories; I register chemistry, pressure, and direction. I leave the ocean because my body remembers a river the way a clock remembers midnight.

This book takes you inside that body. Sparse, sensory chapters—birth in gravel, the slow remapping to salt, the rumble of magnetism, the naming of home by smell—trace a life driven by appetite, physics, and place, not meaning. Read it to feel the grit in a jaw, the first salt on a tongue, the uprising surge when water turns upriver. Read it to learn a limit: some minds refuse human translation, and that refusal is its own clarity. I speak because I must; you listen because you want to know what it sounds like when the river calls something back to disappear.