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The Interdimensional Rift at the Lucky Sunrise Bingo Palace

by Ryan Cole

So I’m sitting there with Bubbee—the two of us hunched over our empty paper play-cards, our fingers not yet bloody with magenta bingo marker—when the first rift appears.

It’s smaller than I’d expected. Little more than a paper cut in the space-time continuum. Only five inches long as it floats in midair beside the flimsy folding card table in the back of the ballroom, where the purple carpet flows into the heart of the Bingo Palace. As I watch, it starts to fold, slinky-style, over itself, ‘til the air turns hot and the rift starts to crackle and the paper cut rips into a three-foot-long gash, and before I can speak, before I can nudge Bubbee to warn the referee, there’s an arm poking out from the chasm in the air, then a chest and a face and a whole body slips from whatever dimension it decided to leave to fall into our own.

Bubbee sees it too. “Damn doppelgangers,” she says. “Can’t win at their own games, so they come to steal ours.”

I can feel her frustration. It’s the same as she’s shown every Monday night for months, when she comes home complaining of the doppelgangers ruining her seventy-year-old hobby, despite the rules preventing interdimensional play. The same as I’ve heard from the Channel 7 News when they rant about the rifts popping wild through the town, causing mischief and mayhem. Not so fair when the travel only works in one direction: from their world to ours. When they’re the only ones who can open up a portal, slipping back inside before it fizzles into nothing.

Can you believe it? she’d say to me and Mom over dinner, while the brisket and kugel sizzled noisily in the oven. Dorothea won again. For the third time this month. No matter that she’s been dead in our world for six years.

Sorry, Bubbee, we’d say in an attempt to calm her down. But nothing ever helps. Not better luck next time or you can’t win them all or I’m sure the rifts will stop, it’s only a matter of time.

But the rifts haven’t stopped. They’ve only gotten worse over the last few months—ever since Zaydee died, and I told Bubbee my secret (with a bold, capital S), and the silence in our house became its own little rift, pushing us apart one conversation at a time. Hard not to have some distance when the person you thought you loved can’t love you back, can’t accept who you are.

Are you sure? Bubbee would say to me, her eyes wet with desperation. Could it maybe be a phase? Hoping it was all just a silly mistake, and the boy she saw me kissing by the mailbox wasn’t real, and I could go back to being who she wanted me to be: just Avi again, her sixteen-year-old grandson, who she could brag about at Temple to all the girls my age, who could give her the great-grandchildren she’d dreamt of since I was born. Who didn’t have a secret that fractured our family, that killed my only grandpa. Drowning me in guilt no matter how hard I try to float.

That always makes me think: if I’d kept my mouth shut, would Zaydee still be alive?

Not like I’ll ever know. I’ll never know if Zaydee would have shared in their silence, the worry that my choices would bring shame on our family, if he’d take back the hugs and the gentle I love you’s that my younger self craved. That I still crave, on days when I let myself remember. When the guilt runs too thick.

But today, I have to be strong. Today, I have a mission. It’s the day of the jackpot—the biggest bingo prize in a year’s worth of games. And I hope, if Bubbee wins—if I help Bubbee win—it can erase some of my guilt. Maybe, it can help Bubbee love me again.

I play over in my head what we’ve been practicing for weeks: locate the rift, stop the doppelganger from playing in our match, and lead them back through their portal. Simple. Easy-peasy.

Except when that doppelganger doesn’t want to leave.

“Excuse me,” I say once they’ve sat down at their table near the back of the ballroom, away from prying eyes.

The woman doesn’t answer. She slouches in her cardigan and chunky pearl necklace, her wig in disarray above the knob of her hearing aid, and I try to imagine the best of intentions. She simply didn’t hear me. An honest mistake. Maybe she didn’t even realize she traveled from another dimension, breaking the first rule of the Lucky Sunrise playbook.

“Ma’am, you have to leave,” I say, reaching for her shoulder. But when my fingers touch her cardigan—a fluffy braided blue like the ones Bubbee used to knit for me—she snatches my arm, serpent-quick and full of venom, and she digs her yellow fingernails into my skin.

We stand there, frozen, the rift’s glossy residue still sparking beside her. She looks at the cash-filled jar on the stage, her eyes wide with hunger, and as the referee strolls down the table-lined aisle, I can see in her expression that she knows she’s already lost.

“Is there a problem?” says the doppelganger, honey-sweet, to the referee.

The referee, whose name tag on her t-shirt says “Sandra,” points an unforgiving finger at the shimmering rift, her other hand resting on the mace can at her hip. “Nice try, Eleanor. But the rules are the rules. You want to go back through on your own, or should I carry you?”

Eleanor, the doppelganger, sighs in disappointment. “Was worth a shot,” she says before she lets go of my arm, pulls open the rift, and slides into the ether, the portal snapping shut in a spray of glittering dust motes.

“Thanks a bunch,” says Sandra, while I stare into the air where the rift used to be. “Gonna be a lot more of those today, I can feel it.” She strolls to the stage, resumes her not-so-menacing guard stance by the stairs, and by the time I sit down in my chair next to Bubbee, another woman steps, clickety-clack, onto the stage in a pair of orange high-heels and a polka-dot skirt.

“Good afternoon,” says the emcee. “Welcome to the annual Lucky Sunrise jackpot game!” Then she dips a white-gloved hand into a small plastic bucket, pulls out a miniature yellow ping-pong ball, and smiles as she leans into the microphone and calls out: “B-13!”

---

Two more doppelgangers appear before she can call the next number.

Bubbee doesn’t notice. She’s too busy tracing her marker over her play-card, checking the blank squares, counting and dreaming of the winning combinations. She doesn’t see as I sprint across the length of the ballroom—less Lucky Sunrise and more bruised purple carpet—and I squeeze between tables with cigarettes pressed dead into their still-smoldering ash trays.

The first doppelganger—a mostly bald man with a pair of tortoise-shell glasses—thinks he’s sneakier than he really is. He pops out of his rift, pulls a folded bingo play-card from the pocket of his khakis, and hovers by the hallway that leads out of the ballroom. He drops his bingo marker in surprise when I reach him and snatch his play-card from his hands. Same as the surprise that I feel on my own face. Is that Mr. DaSilva, my middle-school principal? Who warned me to deepen my voice a couple notches, keep the flick out of my wrist, the lilt from my step so I could just be more… normal. More like the other boys. For my own good, he promised.

But Mr. DaSilva’s been dead for two years. Caught by colon cancer long before Zaydee died.

In this dimension, at least.

Unlike the other doppelganger, he runs. Pops full-bodied into the rift he’d created, and from the fear in his eyes, I wonder if maybe I’m the one he was scared of. If, in his form of reality, I’m the same as I am here: a risk, a disappointment, a stain on my otherwise respectable family. If every version of me is inevitably corrupt. Inevitably made wrong.

But there isn’t time to ask him. I run towards the other doppelganger who appears near the front of the stage—a copy of a woman in the third row of tables, her silver hair swept back into a wispy thin ponytail. She grimaces as soon as Sandra grabs her can of mace and blocks the entrance to the stairs.

But Sandra can’t go too far, can’t leave the jackpot unguarded. Too much of a chance that a rift will appear in the center of the stage and a pair of greedy hands will try to pull the jar through.

Just like what happened last year.

So, I do what she can’t. I smile at the doppelganger creeping up the stage, and I ask, very nicely, if she’ll kindly back away, the jar ever trained in my peripheral vision. Thinking of everything Bubbee could buy with a fortune like that: a better car, better house, a shiny new pair of dentures, a couch that doesn’t smell like the brisket she burned on Rosh Hashanah last year. Knowing, in my heart, what she’ll do with it instead, if I can only win it for her: a trip to Las Vegas, where she’ll stay at the Mandalay Bay on the Strip, spending it all on slot machines and martinis, like she and Zaydee once did on the night of their wedding, almost sixty years ago.

But the doppelganger ignores me. She lunges at the jar, falls directly into Sandra. And it isn’t ‘til Sandra leads her, strong-armed, through the rift, that I wonder if maybe we can’t win after all. That the odds are stacked against us.

I can see Bubbee waving at me from our table. Good job, that smile says. But I know what else to look for—the sag of her lip, the disappointment in her eyes where there used to be a shine. When she used to be proud of me. The weight of her expectations crushing me to dust.

Because she knows as well as I do: I’m a failure, just like I was a failure before, on the day Zaydee died, and no matter what I do, in her eyes, I’ll never be anything else.

---

Rift after rift, the doppelgangers appear.

A copy of the man in the first row aisle seat, whose Gandalf-staff cane is the only thing holding him up. A younger version of the woman by the trash can near the front, whose grape-soda-purple hair has now faded to gray. Mr. Solomon, the trash-truck man who left town when I was eight. Mr. Murphy, the postman, who Mom says she might have married if she’d never met Dad.

One by one, I try to get them to leave. Asking politely. Reciting the rules. And if I have to: using force. Dragging them, kicking and screaming, through their rifts. Sighing in relief as they wink out of existence. Bracing myself for the voice of the emcee as she calls out more numbers from the microphone on the stage—I-20; G-53; N-42—her tinny voice echoing on the yellow-plaster walls. Thinking, with each one, that’s it, the game’s over, someone else is gonna win.

But no one ever does.

There’s still a chance for me and Bubbee. I can see her hunched and ready, body tensed for the right number to leave the emcee’s lips. She can do this. We can do this.

And then I see a rift behind the lonely jackpot jar, at the center of the stage. A pair of hands reaching through the growing slit in the air. They hit the table holding the jar upright, send the whole thing crashing and clinking to the floor.

Dollar bills fly everywhere. The jackpot spreads across the entirety of the stage.

The audience erupts. Even the other doppelgangers are up in wrinkled arms.

“Interference!” yells one, and then, “Call the police!” But the police won’t come. They’re too busy fighting other rift infiltrations—ones that actually matter, as the sheriff likes to say. By the time they arrive, the doppelgangers will be gone. Just like they always are.

But what else can we do? I’m as useless as the emcee-woman trapped on the stage, who yells, “The game is paused!” ‘til she can gather the money, make sure none was stolen.

Which Bubbee doesn’t like. She’s as angry as all the other screaming bingo patrons, waving her wet magenta marker in outrage.

I linger near the back, where the uproar hasn’t reached.

And that’s when I see it: a ripple in the air; a paper cut turned to glowing five-foot-tall rift, where no one else is looking, near the entrance to the hallway.

A man steps out, his mustache as bushy as the day I last saw him, his skin less sallow and his bones less pronounced, but his eyes have all the warmth I remember them having. All the warmth I’ve been grieving for three long months.

He locks eyes with me. The whole world around us seems to stop.

And then Zaydee runs.

---

He’s faster than I remember, tennis shoes streaking down the Lucky Sunrise hallway, cutting past the empty conference rooms lining either side. He’s missing the limp from his second knee replacement, doesn’t have the extra weight he gained post-surgery. Which makes sense. This Zaydee isn’t the one I used to know. He’s a copy, a doppelganger, an invader from beyond. This Zaydee is a stranger.

Still, I chase after him. Desperate to get one more glimpse of his face, hear the grit of his cigarette-thick voice in my ear, taste the words I’ve been longing for Bubbee to say since the morning of the funeral: that I’m still the same Avi; that a kiss and a boy and a secret she hates doesn’t change who I am.

But Zaydee keeps running, full-sprint down the hallway. Which only feeds into my crippling doubt, the belief that I’m still not the grandson he wanted, no matter which version of reality we’re in.

He slows down, ducks through a conference room door. And before he can close it, before he can shut me out like Bubbee’s done for months, I slip through the opening, tripping on the scuffed purple carpet in the threshold, and I come face-to-face with the man I adore, the man I can’t let go of. The first one I trusted enough to tell my secret.
Zaydee bends over, hands shaking on his knees, breath coming in gasps—suddenly showing his seventy-two-year-old stamina—and he looks up at me and says, “Looks like you caught me.”

It’s odd to hear his voice. Like the voice of a ghost. I reach out and touch him, just to make sure he’s there, to make sure he’s real, and he smiles as a tear starts to drip down my cheek.

“Guess she didn’t mention I would come,” he says softly.

It takes me a moment to process the words, to find my own voice, lost deep in the worry of what he might say, of how he might hurt me, paralyzed by the secret I never should have told him. “She… she knew you were coming?” I say in disbelief.

“Same time every week, for the last couple months.” He rubs at his neck, cheeks rosy with guilt, and he shies from the wet accusation in my eyes. “It was Bubbee’s idea not to tell you,” he says, hands raised in defense. “I wanted to—really—but she said you weren’t ready, that you still held a grudge for what your Zaydee never told you. For how he reacted. He was proud of you, you know. It’s just”—he pauses and licks at his mustache-lined lips—“Bubbee said he didn’t know the right way to tell you. And then, it was too late.”

My throat goes dry. My chest feels tight. My lips half-numb as I ask him the question I’ve wanted to for months, since the rifts started opening. “Is it the same there? In your dimension, I mean.”

“Some things are,” says Zaydee. “But only so much. Over there, I lost Bubbee.” His eyes lose their focus as they drift into the past. “I’m the one who survived her. I take you every week to the Lucky Sunrise games. Me and you, we’re a team.” He grins as if he knows what I want to ask next. “And yes, you told me there. Your capital-S secret? And Avi, I want you to believe me: it’s going to be okay. Your Bubbee doesn’t blame you. It wasn’t your fault.”

I drink in the words as if I’ve never tasted water, the sentence going back-to-back-to-back in my mind.

It’s going to be okay.

It wasn’t your fault.

Zaydee leans to hold me; he cups my trembling chin in his soft, gentle hand, so warm and familiar. “Come on,” he says. “Your Bubbee’s got a jackpot to win.”

---

When we run down the hallway and slip into the ballroom, Lucky Sunrise is in chaos.

There are doppelgangers everywhere, splitting from their rifts with a snap-crackle-hiss. Dozens of false patrons where there used to be a handful, packing the aisles like shriveled sardines, climbing the stage with their play-cards in hand, bingo squares wet with numbers that haven’t yet been called. They surround the emcee, surround Sandra, who’s still collecting money from the stage, the jackpot jar filled to the brim with cash and coins.

Zaydee and I stop at the back of the room, at a loss for what to do. Stunned by the noise and the sizzling heat from all the rifts left open. The carpet starts to smoke from a rift by my foot, and I stamp out the sparks before the room can catch fire. Before the whole game gets canceled. Before I lose my one and only chance to win Bubbee back.

That’s when I see her. Squeezing through the aisle. Running like I’ve never seen her run in my life—even faster than Black Friday in the Spend n’ Save parking lot, when TVs were on sale for seventy-five percent off. When she reaches us, she grabs Zaydee’s arm to catch her balance, hugs him with a strength I haven’t seen her show in months. “I thought you weren’t coming,” she says into his chest.

As she hugs him, I try to believe what Zaydee said, that he can somehow be right. That we can still be the happy family I thought was buried in the past.

Then Bubbee pulls away, and she reaches for my hand. Her eyes seem to swim with all the things she wants to say, that I need her to say: I’m sorry I didn’t tell you; I’m sorry I’ve been so hard on you. What she’s been holding too tight, in her soul-crushing silence: when she picks me up from school; when she passes by my bedroom, doesn’t sit on my bed to trade laughter and gossip like she’d done since I was a kid. Doesn’t kiss me goodnight, say a prayer that I’d find a cute girl to marry.

Instead, it all comes wrapped in only three words. “I’m sorry, Avi.”

I lean into her smile, feel the weight of her silence start to slip from my shoulders. The lightest I’ve been in the last three months.

At that moment, the doppelgangers rush onto the stage. One of them leaps at the unguarded jar. And as they pull out a handful of wadded dollar bills and the room goes hot from the many smoking rifts, I do the only thing I think might buy us some time.

I let go of Bubbee. I sprint to the front of the Lucky Sunrise ballroom. Reach for the fire alarm handle by the stage. Then I yell, full-throated, into the mayhem: “QUIET!”

---

The room goes silent.

Every patron, every doppelganger, turns around to face me. Even those with their hands in the jackpot jar pause.

I start to sweat from their frustration, the hunger in their eyes, the desperation to steal the game I can’t let them win. “Go back to your seats,” I yell into the silence. “Or I swear, I’ll pull this handle. And then the game will really be over.”

The audience grumbles; they look around the room for a way to get rid of me. For the first time, they seem to see the bedlam around them, their eyes going wide at the destruction they’ve caused—the tables tipped over, the broken-legged chairs, the rift network sparking like the Fourth of July.

For a moment, I think they might actually listen. A few of them, dejectedly, start to climb down from the stage.

But no, it’s a feint. A woman with a silver perm and oversized hoop earrings breaks away from the crowd. She barrels into me, her shoulder in my stomach, and I let go of the fire alarm as we both crash to the floor.

The rest of the room doesn’t seem to know what to do. Some of the doppelgangers slump to their seats, some stand watching in awe from the stage, and others, like Bubbee, sit eagerly waiting for the emcee to pluck another ball from her bucket.

“O-67,” says the emcee into her microphone. “N-44,” as the rest of the room wakes up.

I shimmy away from the woman on top of me, whose breath stinks of cigarettes, her fingers smeared bloody with magenta bingo marker.

But she’s not as quick as Zaydee was. Not as quick as I am. I pull myself away, reaching up towards the handle.

I don’t need to pull it. Because then I see Bubbee, her play-card held high and her eyes bright with triumph, running frantically down the aisle. And even though I can’t hear her, even though I can’t believe it, I can make out the shape of two words on her lips. Words we both need. Words I thought she’d never get to say.

I won.

---

It only takes a few minutes to prove Bubbee right.

She laughs at the grumbling complaints from the crowd: the defeated doppelgangers who slink, shoulders hunched, into their slowly closing rifts; the patrons who still can’t accept that they’ve lost, who badger the emcee, demanding a recount, ‘til she has to announce it for the fifteenth time, her voice loud as gospel on the Bingo Palace walls.

Bubbee really did it. She really won the jackpot!

“Good work,” says Bubbee, cuddled up to Zaydee at our table, her winning play-card tucked into the pocket of her blouse.

I bask in her excitement, never wanting this to end. Never wanting to forget the easy comfort of her smile, of her judgment-free eyes, of the happiness we can share when the three of us are a team.

But I know, with a sinking bit of dread, it can’t last.

Zaydee hugs me tight. He whispers goodbye into the curl of Bubbee’s ear. And he slips through his rift just as it crackles too much, as it burns too bright, sliding safely into his own world while he still has a chance.

Then, it’s just the two of us, Bubbee’s hand on mine. For a second, I feel the rift between us start to shrink—the original rift—just a fraction, for now. But I hope, in time, it can continue to close. If we want it enough. If we can learn to love each other.

“Same time next week?” says Bubbee, and she plants a wet, red-lipstick kiss on my cheek.

I feel my heart burst, my chest pulling tight as we walk, hand in hand, through the doors of the Palace and out into the parking lot, knowing I wouldn’t rather be anywhere else.

---

Host Commentary

And we’re back! Again, that was “The Interdimensional Rift at the Lucky Sunrise Bingo Palace”, by Ryan Cole, narrated by Elie Hirschman.

About this story, Ryan says:
This story has a special place in my heart. My grandma loved bingo. She would go to play almost every week, and some of my fondest memories as a kid are of playing bingo games with her at her apartment, just the two of us. This story was loosely inspired by all the fun we had together, and my wish that I could have had the chance to come out to her before she passed away.

And about this story, I say:
This is an absolute delight of a story. I could just see it all vividly springing to life: the bingo parlor full of viciously competitive octogenarians, and their doppelganger counterparts sneaking through the rifts. Ryan Cole does a marvelous job here taking a funny premise and mining it for all its comedic potential. Like the first doppelganger that our protagonist tries to get to leave, with her knob of hearing aid and fluffy blue cardigan, who nevertheless snatches his arm “serpent-quick and full of venom.”

I stand by the premise that comedy is better, funnier, richer, when there’s a serious and true story mixed into it. And this absolute disaster of a bingo parlor is a rich and colorful backdrop for the touching story of a 16yo boy grieving his grandfather, and trying to reconnect with his grandmother. The worldbuilding is arranged to make a lovely setup for our hero to get a chance to see his grandfather one last time, and to get the reassurance he needs. The story looks compassionately at these three people who love each other, and gives the grandparents a chance to fix their mistakes, and try again.

In general Escape Pod news, I want to let you all know that we are OPEN to general submissions until May 31st. If you’re listening to this in the future than first: YAY, and second: that is May 31st, 2025. We would love to see your stories, both reprints and originals, so send them in.

Escape Pod is part of the Escape Artists Foundation, a 501(c)(3) non-profit, and this episode is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license. Don’t change it. Don’t sell it. Please, go forth and share it.

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Our opening and closing music is by daikaiju at daikaiju.org.

And our closing quotation this week is from Angie Thomas in The Hate U Give, who said: “At an early age I learned that people make mistakes, and you have to decide if their mistakes are bigger than your love for them.”

Thanks for listening! And have fun.