A teenager is tasked with writing a report on 'the past' with the help of an elderly relative. Inside of an elderly living center, an old man named Rhett recounting his life's story to his young grandson.

Rhett starts with a few basic details about his upbringing--where he grew up, the two brothers he grew up with, etc. Eventually Rhett gets a bit more vulnerable and tells his grandson about how his mother moved out of the house because of her manic depression. He reveals how he and his younger brother still spent a lot of time with their mother, even after she moved out of the house. But eventually she became paranoid and delusional, complaining about things like entities trying to come to her through the electrical sockets. The mother's psychosis culminates in a large and detailed map of a mystical world she draws before she commits suicide.

After her suicide, Rhett finds a cookie jar in her house that magically refills with cookies no matter how many are taken out. He keeps this information to himself, goes off to war, gets married, and spends years of his life doing standard adult things before he one day rediscovers the cookie jar. Sitting in his attic, he manages to completely empty the jar of cookies for just long enough to peer inside and witness the fantasy world that his mother had so often described.

He reveals all of this information to his young grandson, who remains skeptical until Rhett points him to the exact spot in the attic that the cookie jar can still be found. The grandson runs off to inspect the cookie jar, with his grandfather wondering if he has doomed the boy to suffer in the way that his mother had.