Four playing poker

A low-watt bulb in a cheap lampshade illuminated the table top, and anything caught above it, in a cone that had hooked its apex to the tungsten filament. Smoke stratified the air, moving barely. Outside this cone nothing existed except as a suggestion. Four people sat, perhaps. there were the hints of featureless walls. There may have been a door.

1.

The first leaned forward into the light: first his cheeks, then his mean forehead and chin were visible. Each of the spines on his unshaven chin was a "V" composed of one grey and one black needle. His skin was almost as colourless as his beard under the glare. One hand skittered up to his face and stroked his bristles as he frowned.

He looked at his three companions and adversaries who did not seem to exist, one at a time. Realistically it could not help his decision, as they had no faces visible to be read, poker or otherwise. Still it hardened his resolve into a choice. He indicated this choice by moving rapidly back into obscurity, save his fretting hand which scooped up two chips of identical colour. They were launched haphazardly into a bowl, to lie upon a rainbow of other chips. "See five, raise five," was heard across the table, and the hand disappeared.

2.

With one fluid unaccelerated movement, the second swung himself forward. His eyes were rectangular and slitted, like a pillbox seen edge-on, and looked through glasses that matched their shape, only larger. The two of them looked steadily forward from his flat, expressionless face.

"See your ten," he clipped. Lips as angular as his eyes cut and chopped the words into shape. Manicured digits appeared and handled a single chip, of a different colour to the two sitting on top of the pile. This chip was apparently worth ten alone, and was almost placed rather than thrown, along with its cousins, in the centre of the table. As the hand receded, this gentleman's head glided back out of sight.

3.

The fat, beery face of a third player appeared. It glistened in the light, showing its curves in a sheen of sweat. Eyebrows and fat moustache were blond or light brown, and his chin had a non-identical twin, bunched up by his collar. He blew out air which confused the smoke.

Cards appeared in one hand, flashing bright red backs as if to attract other cards. Depending on the individual, the combined stereoscopy of the human eyes can stretch to some one hundred and fifty degrees from left to right. True focus can only be obtained within a few degrees of the eyes' axis of vision, but is often not necessary to recognise exaggerated artistic features, such as the scowl of a knave as distinct from the curves of a queen. Suspecting this he bent his cards into an arc that subtended a similar fovea's worth of degrees.

A second hand reached over to a whisky glass on the table. The whisky glass was present all the time. Like the pot and the table and the stakes, it had its own existence. It was steady even as the liquid inside rocked from side to side: it steadied and the fat man swung around it in space. His fat, hairy fingers clung tightly to it, and his rubbery lips inhaled a short draught of its contents. Blinking, seeing the table for the first time, the face retreated even as the hand flung the cards outwards and slammed the glass down. "Fold," called the retreating lips and they vanished.

4.

From the direction of where the fourth player might have been sitting there came a high-voiced grunt. It was difficult to tell whether the grunt emanated from features expressing humour, resignation or any other emotion. The grunt itself was bleached as it passed over the lit table. A few fingers slipped over the chips at that side of the table, and disappeared. Half a second later a pale, delicate hand sliced through the light and a chip, worth precisely ten in whatever units they were using and of a similar colour to the second man's most recent bet, appeared by prestidigitation and with a clink in the pot.

"See ten," said a voice in a similar tone to the earlier grunt, and perhaps the voice came from the final chip, sitting with finality on the top of the pile. It was that little disc of plastic that spoke in a clear voice to two of the three pitch-black edges of the table.

"What do you have?"