“Grab that for me, baby,” Mavis Turner said, pointing at the large soup pot that sat on top of the refrigerator. It was too large to fit inside any cabinet.
Zacchaeus grabbed it and spun it on one finger; the edge of the circular bottom rested on his finger tip as the large pot rotated like a basketball. He put it on the countertop, still spinning, and his grandmother chuckled.
“I see you good with more than cards,” Mavis Turner said and grabbed the pot mid-spin.
“That’s how I stay sharp,” Zacchaeus said.
He kissed the old woman on her forehead; she was a foot shorter than him. Her skin was like a fine, brown tissue paper with visible wrinkles at the corners of her eyes where black moles dotted her temples like freckles. The hair on her head was thick and long in a ponytail at her back; it was jet-black with no sign of grey.
“I got a long way to go if I’m ever gone be as good as you,” he continued.
He sat at the small table in the kitchen and watched as she turned on the flame under the large pot, and started to shovel the mound of chopped pork into it. She had already chopped up vegetables as well that were colorful mounds on the countertop.
“You already good as me,” she said as the meat sizzled and she pushed it around with a long wooden spoon. “In some ways you better, I can admit that. And even if I’m still the best, I’m old and I can’t help but slow down.”
“You over a hundred and you still be cooking,” Zacchaeus said with wonder. “You move around like a fifty year old, probably better than most. If you slower than you used to be, I can’t tell.”
“Tell that to yo mama and yo auntie,” she said with a laugh.
“They can’t help but worry, grandma, they love you. And you is over a hundred.”
“They trying to get me to stop going to the Canned Heat,” she continued. “Say a hundred year old woman ain’t got no business in a place like that. Hell, I’m the one that made that place. If it ain’t for me, then who it’s for?”
“They don’t see you down there like I do,” Zacchaeus said proudly. “Don’t nobody move cards around like my grandma, even with yo old, dirty deck. You still the quickest hands anywhere.”
Mavis Turner always carried her deck on her person. The deck had an eerie, ornate black background that seemed to shift and change to Zacchaeus when he really studied the cards. Despite the wear and tear on the face of the cards, the design on the backs looked as though they had been recently printed.
Without warning, and with very little indication of movement, Mavis Turner grabbed a card with two fingers from her deck that was in a pocket of the apron she wore, and flicked it behind her. It moved through the air so fast that it was mostly a black blur that Zacchaeus caught just in front of his eyeball with two of his long fingers.
“You sharp,” she said as she turned from the pot. “That woulda took somebody else’s eye out.”
“I got skills, grandma,” he said, “I know that. But I will always be the grandson of Mavis Turner. You the pinnacle, I’m just a peak.”
Zacchaeus flipped the card around with one hand, catching it between his fingers and tossing it in an impressive display. As it moved through the air, Zacchaeus noticed a black haze following it, like the card was giving off smoke.
He held it between his index finger and his thumb, eyeing the face of it. The faint, black haze continued to billow off the top, but Zacchaeus was transfixed on the black spade. It could have been a trick of the eye, but Zacchaeus could see slight movement of the spade, like it was a quivering blob of ink, and he inched it closer to his nose as he inspected it.
“I ain’t gone be around forever,” Mavis Turner said from the stove. She had shoveled most of the mounds of vegetables into the pot and was stirring them deliberately.
Zacchaeus looked away from the spade and stared at his grandmother’s slightly hunching back.
“You used to say that when I was little,” he said, “and look at you. Still the same grandma.”
“I done lived a full life and I’m thankful for it,” she said. “I can’t tell you how hard it was to outlive all my siblings and my friends, but it’s been a blessing for sure, to see my kids and they kids, and then they kids kids get older. To see you, my favorite grandson, grow into the impressive man you is. Don’t tell nobody you my favorite, but you is.”
Zacchaeus smiled at her. He was still holding the card and he didn’t notice the black of the spade seemingly growing out from the surface of the card and toward his face.
“But I ain’t gone live forever baby,” she said. “It’s something I wanted to talk serious with you about…”
“I need your help with something,” Zacchaeus interrupted her.
Not only did he hate talking about her mortality, but the strangeness of the ace of spades in his hand made him remember a man that he’d encountered at a high-stakes poker game that was attended by very rich and influential people in their twenties and thirties. He’d talked to the man for most of the time he was at the game that he eventually won over the course of the two days the large yacht floated in international waters. The man was odd; his face was either too large or too small, he had a noticeable twitch that moved his body in strange ways, and he had a strange way of blinking that was subtle. Zacchaeus studied him closely to determine what was off about it.
The man was strange, but he worked for the company known as COHH Inc, that started as a software company but evolved over time to encompass everything from gaming, to social media, cloud computing and storage, and web hosting, to name just a sampling of their modern day reach. The humanitarian branch of COHH Inc is a non-profit think-tank known as the Consortium of Human History, the head of which was revealed to be the source of Illuminatos, who seized humanity with his spores and dropped the world into the Ill Nights that lasted for more than seven hundred days.
The strange man worked as an engineer for the company and the more Zacchaeus talked to him, the more the man bragged about the cutting-edge technology that he developed for his work.
“What you need baby?” Mavis Turner asked. She seemed content with the food in the pot and she sat with Zacchaeus at the table. She took the ace of spades from him.
“There’s a man that heard about your table, he wanna play your high-stakes, elimination, tournament. He ain’t much of a player, easy win for you and your deck, if he even get that far, but I want something from him.”
Mavis Turner eyed him and nodded slowly.
“What is it?” she asked frankly.
“Something I heard about at the fancy tables I be playing,” Zacchaeus explained. “Something only rich people who know the right people know about.”
“Don’t play with that secret, white people shit,” Mavis Turner said seriously. “You don’t know what kind of mess they be playing with. You mess around, end up like the dummies be betting they life away.”
“This ain’t chasing money or nothing like that, grandma. What I’m talking about is hard to explain. You know how all these regular people going into space? It’s all over the news, you can spend a bunch of money to go up in a rocketship for a few minutes, pretty soon you can pay to go to the moon or further than that.”
“So this man can get you on a spaceship?” Mavis Turner asked. “You can make that money at one of your rich people tables.”
“What this man got access to is something like going to space, but better. He know how to get to a different Earth, a different Mississippi, where you and me exist but we different. He know how to Sublime, only the company he work for can do it. And only a few people done got to do it and they all made it back to this Earth safe.”
Mavis Turner scrunched up her nose at him in confusion.
“A different Earth? It’s only one Earth,” she said skeptically.
“That’s what most people think,” Zacchaeus said. “But help me set this up and I can show you proof.”
“I don’t know what the hell you talking about,” Mavis Turner said frankly, “but if it mean that much to you, and somebody sitting on secrets like my grandson ain’t good enough, then I’ll do what I can to help you. You better be ready to pay what the deck missing out on, though.”
“What you mean?” Zacchaeus asked. “I gotta find somebody else to bet they life?”
“You gotta be ready with whatever the deck ask for when it ask.”
“Grandma, you the deck,” he said. “What you want instead of killing this man when he lose?”
“You don’t get it, baby,” Mavis Turner said. “But one day soon, we gone have to talk about it. Real soon if you asking me to do this. I’ll talk to the deck, but we can make it work if you say it’s worth it.”
For a moment, Zacchaeus smiled nervously. His grandmother often said strange things about her deck of cards that she’d had for most of her life as they sat in her kitchen, but she spoke very seriously this time.
He decided that this was good news and he ignored his apprehension, because from the moment he’d seen footage on the news from parallel worlds years ago, Zacchaeus was eager to know if human beings could develop the technology to travel to them. And if it was possible, he wanted to go to another world and see for himself that it wasn’t all an elaborate hoax.
He was in his mid-thirties, but he smiled at his grandmother like he was an adolescent. She kissed his forehead, then left the table to check her food on the stove.
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