Listener Supported
For December, the Sunday Morning Transport brings you new stories and, as is our annual tradition, a Storyflod of favorites from throughout the year at the end of the month. We begin with this week’s tale from Juan Martinez (whose spectacular “Lesser Demons of the North Shore” appeared in April 2024), and next week’s spooky story from Stephanie Feldman (also a fantastic SMT alum with “The Sorcerer’s Test,” in September 2022). As always, the first story of the month is free to read.
We are grateful to our paying subscribers, who allow us to keep rolling throughout the year. If you haven’t already, please consider signing up or giving a gift subscription.
In this month’s first, free, story, Juan Martinez chills us with a story of creeping losses.
~ Julian and Fran, December 7, 2025
Listener Supported
by Juan Martinez
The husband took a pocket radio to bed every night because he fell asleep much earlier than his wife and he woke up much earlier, often at five a.m. but earlier sometimes, and sometimes he didn’t sleep much at all. But—pre-radio—if he got out of bed he invariably woke her up, and if he stayed in bed he fidgeted and woke her up in a gradual, more unintentionally insidious and crazy-making way, so he found this solution, a yellow Sangean, defiantly analog, that he would turn on, earbud in one ear, so he could listen to whatever tragedies had befallen the world in his half-sleep. He could stay in bed and be still—and he’d stay in that half-awake state until six a.m., when the automatic coffee maker turned on and he’d hear it gurgle to life, the carafe alive with steam, the smell of coffee rich in the house. That was his cue to get up. And before then he was mostly half-awake and thankful for public radio, and at night that meant that the station played world news from the BBC.
In his half-awake state it never quite felt like the news was entirely real.
The broadcast, he suspected, had just made up a terrible fire in an orphanage. The broadcast might have even made up the country where the orphanage fire had occurred. He had certainly never heard of it, so it was possible, he thought, or at least not impossible. Like, at the very least, the orphanage fire was not beyond the realm of reason. Who knew? Who knew what was going on elsewhere? So much was going on over here, right now, none of it all right.
He himself was not doing all right, he would tell you.
If he could. He could not.
This ritual of his—the radio, the earbud, the suspicion behind what he heard—all of it happened a few years ago during the COVID-19 pandemic, and it kept on going as he moved with his newly pregnant wife from their tiny condo in the Pilsen neighborhood to an Airbnb in Woodford County, Kentucky, and it continued even after they returned to Pilsen, after their child was born.
He would have liked to tell you how some public radio stations still insisted on playing music after a certain hour, particularly on weekends. He grew violently opposed to most jazz because of that late-night insistence. Some jazz turned out to be almost tolerable. He listened regardless, and he always missed the transition from jazz to world news during an indeterminate moment in the night. He didn’t drink, he detested drugs. All he had was the radio. After their first child he listened even more, and he grew to love how NPR’s Morning Edition repeated their segments after the first hour, and how All Things Considered did the same, though the segments sometimes featured subtle corrections or additions introduced as the news changed, as the world changed.
He could not go to bed without the radio, was the thing.
One night he forgot to check the batteries and the radio died early on, and he stayed awake, mindlessly trying to coax it back to life, not daring to get up because he did not want to disturb his wife, who was not getting enough sleep to begin with. He kept spare batteries handy after that night. He grew to love the occasional ads that assumed he had a spare car that he was no longer using, the suggestion that he donate it to his local public radio station. He didn’t, he wouldn’t; he was amazed that people had such a thing, a spare car. All they had was their one car, now outfitted with a baby seat, and they mostly only used it for pediatrician appointments. They worked from home. In the mornings he walked his child to day care and then spent an hour or two walking, partly to give his wife a little space. Their condo, which had not felt small when they’d bought it, had grown cramped with the arrival of the baby.
That’s what he told her, at any rate.
The truth was this: the radio now asked him to find and warn people about ICE. It had started innocently enough. Even in his sleepless state, he knew that a few of the countries that the radio now mentioned could not be found on any map. He made a note to himself to look them up during the day, only to discover that some did not, in fact, exist. Most, he was sorry to admit, did exist. And the people the radio named were all distressingly real. So were the neighborhoods, the street addresses. All real, all Chicago.
And the voice delivering the warnings? That voice existed in his waking world, it belonged to an actual living person—he’d actually seen this person, a local celebrity, at a company event, not long after the birth of his child. But what the voice said during the night was not exactly news.
The dates were always off, for one thing, either a week or a day ahead or long in the past.
And the information was now always about the ICE raids, which he himself did not need to worry about. He had become naturalized. His wife had been born in Kentucky. He had nothing to worry about, not personally. His family would be fine. Other families? Not so much.
And so when the voice—always measured, calm, empathetic, always very much an NPR voice—told him about the raids, provided specific details about where to go, who had disappeared, he went there.
And if the person was still there, he knew the warning had come in at just the right time. He warned them. He moved on.
He had originally kept the part about the radio secret, because it sounded crazy and because he needed to be believed, he needed the person to heed his warning. Now he told the person everything. He knew too much about their lives anyway—their name, the names of their loved ones, where they came from. He told them when and where ICE was coming. Thank you, they said. They kept on saying it: Thank you, thank you, thank you. They asked if he could tell them about what would happen to others (Margarita? Asunción? Pedro?) and he told them the truth: he only knew what the radio told him, and the knowledge lasted as long as the bleary morning that followed the sleepless night—the names and details faded, hour by hour. He listened. He walked. He warned. He forgot. His wife asked him if he was all right and he told her he was fine, as fine as you could be, given the state of the world.
He listened.
He once walked all the way to a supermarket to find it entirely empty, the shelves turned over. A CTA driver joined him, asked him where everybody went. The bus driver usually took his bathroom breaks here. The bus driver said that the cashier’s name was Asunción, he saw her here all the time, he was sure she had her papers. No way they took her, right? They couldn’t? How could they? The husband didn’t know. Surely, the bus driver said, they didn’t take everyone. They couldn’t, right? They could, was the thing.
The radio sometimes sent him to a block that was completely free of people.
He never slept after that sort of day. Did he remember the spare batteries? Did he have other batteries elsewhere, just in case? He did. He listened. Sometimes, rarely, he did fall asleep, and when he did he dreamed that he was listening to the radio, the radio in the dreams not at all different from the radio in his waking life.
Listen, the radio asked.
Please.
There were so many people to warn. He found fewer every day.
He grew thin, red-eyed, irritable. He went to bed early so he could listen to the radio. He crept out of bed while his wife and daughter slept.
The radio insisted that he should wake them up, that they were coming for him, for his whole family, though of course this was impossible. He was a citizen. So was his wife. So was his daughter. ICE had no jurisdiction here.
Though of course he was no longer sure of what here meant, exactly.
He no longer recognized the streets without their people.
The whole neighborhood had grown so quiet. He was safe, at least. He had nothing to worry about. He needed to make some coffee, to get ready to take his daughter to her preschool. Surely he had people he needed to warn, but he couldn’t at the present moment remember who, exactly, and he couldn’t explain why he stood by the front door, why he held the carafe of scalding coffee in one hand, why he was so thoroughly unsurprised when the doorbell rang, when the ringing was replaced by insistent, official, violent knocking.
Surely, he thought, the knocking will stop.
It wouldn’t, though.
The radio had insisted on this last detail: The knocking wouldn’t stop, it would go on and on, nothing would stop until people stopped it. He raised the carafe. The door burst open.
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Thank you for joining our journey this week.
Juan Martinez is the author of the novel Extended Stay (2023) and the story collection Best Worst American (2017). He lives near Chicago and is an associate professor at Northwestern University. His work has appeared most recently in EPOCH, Ploughshares, The Chicago Quarterly Review, The Sunday Morning Transport, Huizache, Ecotone, NIGHTMARE, McSweeney’s, NPR’s Selected Shorts, Small Odysseys, Shenandoah, TriQuarterly, Sudden Fiction Latino, Flash Fiction America, and elsewhere, and is forthcoming in a Simon & Schuster/Primero Sueño Latinx horror anthology. Find him online at fulmerford.com and on Bluesky at @fulmerford.com.
“Listener Supported,” © Juan Martinez, 2025.
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