Afflicted · Ransom Media Productions

Feed Drop: How It Ends

December 15, 2022·32 min·2 clips

While sorting through her father's shed, Micah discovers cassette tapes—and plays one to hear the voice of her dead father reading Berenstain Bears to her as a child.

The episode is prefaced by Afflicted creator Tonya Ransom, who introduces How It Ends as a feed drop from a show she loves—an audio drama about a woman named Micah Jones whose night terrors after her father's death lead her to eventually discover her dreams are memories. The first-person podcast format begins with Micah briefly explaining the premise: she makes the show with her two friends, Devin Williams (the editor) and Elliot Cabral (a tarot reader). She describes not having a dream to report because she drove early to New Jersey for Thanksgiving. The episode moves into a recorded conversation between Micah and her mother, conducted in the kitchen, in which they reminisce about a neighborhood friend named Amy while Micah struggles to recover a specific childhood memory near Duke Island Park. Her mother remembers picking Micah up from Perry Street after an incident where she was scratched and had a gash on her forehead, but cannot recall details. Micah pushes, becomes frustrated, and eventually snaps at her mother before going to lie down. Afterward, Micah records privately that she knows the argument was about her father's death anniversary, now 25 years past. She describes Nolan Jones as beloved in the community, a man who would bring home garage sale finds, play guitar badly to amuse her, and maintain a studio shed in the backyard. Going into the shed for the first time since his death, Micah finds cassette tapes her father made of projects and notes. She plays one and hears his voice reading a Berenstain Bears book. She decodes the tape label B-B-P-B-K as Berenstain Bears, Papa Bear, and Kit—her father's nickname for her, since he never called her Micah. She finds another tape that is a song he wrote for her, but she cannot discuss that recording on the episode. A therapy session follows, in which Micah describes the Thanksgiving visit, the shed discovery, and the argument. Her therapist draws out the connection between the lost memory from the Duke Island Park day and her recurring nightmare: in the dream, she is hiking in woods that feel both familiar and unfamiliar, and is being watched; she always wakes up screaming before she can turn around. Micah believes recovering the memory from that day would help explain the dream and allow her to sleep.

As heard by us

Grief, memory, and a dream that keeps circling back.

How It Ends centers grief with an unnerving steadiness. Micah is still living inside the car accident that took her father Nolan in November 1993, and the story keeps pulling her back through night terrors, the recurring dream, and the backyard shed she has not entered since he…

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Why you'd press play

If you want a grief story that turns into a waking-nightmare spiral, press play.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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