Danielle put away the frozen food and turned on the baseboard heater. She read the nice card from the rental’s owners and the invitation to leave a little note in the guest journal. She perused the library and board game selections—all classics. As for the puzzles, there were enough to entertain a medium size penitentiary, and all of them Pacific Northwest-themed.

The kids just sat on the couch and stared at their mother until she showed them the bedroom they all would share, the one with bunk beds. They didn’t know what to make of bunk beds. They’d never seen one before. Finally, the girl climbed up one the ladders and pounced on the bed. She giggled and put her feet up, touched the ceiling with her shoes, and giggled again.

The cabin warmed up with the baseboard heater. A fire in the wood stove was out of the question. Even though the owner had built a perfect starter inside, and left precise directions how to open the flue, start and maintain the fire, and adjust the vents and fan, the act of starting a fire intimidated Danielle. She had never started one before, indoors or outdoors.

Danielle got a pizza going in the oven, poured a mug of rose, the kids cracked the cans of energy drinks and they all looked at each other. Rain had begun to fall with substantial volume so a beach walk was out. Maybe it would clear later. It was noon on the Oregon Coast and raining and a family was trapped inside a cabin without any possibility of escaping to popular media.

Of course! It was puzzle time!

Danielle set up a card table near a large window with a view to the yard and fairway. The boys set up chairs around the table. She told her daughter to pick out a puzzle. The daughter said there were too many to pick from. Danielle told her to grab one at random. The girl grabbed a dust-covered box and dropped it on the table. It was a 1000-piece puzzle of Crater Lake. A 1000 pieces! That would take months!

One of the boys asked what was Crater Lake. Danielle was dumbfounded, but then again, she’d never taken her children to Crater Lake. Disneyland was so much splashier! Then Danielle realized she’d never visited Crater Lake. What kind of Oregonian was she? What kind of Oregon parent am I?

Prior to stowing their gear in the Escalade, Danielle inspected the contents of each kids’ backpack. Nothing but laptops, tablets, game consoles, ear buds, speakers and VR goggles. She didn’t find a single toothbrush or apparel of any kind.

Should she tell them about the cabin’s lack of WiFi, phone reception or even television?

No. Merry Christmas!

They’d shoot up their final media fix in the Escalade through one of its three Internet-enabled screens. Then what? Cold turkey? Would their be withdrawals?

Danielle stopped at a big box grocery retailer on the way to Manzanita. The kids didn’t want to join her shopping. They streamed shows or snap chatted with friends in Finland and Fredonia.

She loaded up on salty snacks, frozen breakfasts, lunches and dinners, canned energy drinks and bottled mochas. When she hit the wine aisle, she debated which box of rose to purchase. Two days alone with her kids, no Internet? She chose the one with 72 tiny glasses silhouetted on the packaging.

No one said a word on the drive. The kids wore headphones or ear buds. Danielle almost wished she could rip a fart for some kind of reaction, anything, but nothing bubbled in the intestines.

She found a radio station playing 80s and 90s Christmas tunes. She turned it up, settled in, and drove Highway 26 into the Coast Range. The higher she climbed, the thicker the fog. She really didn’t know what she was doing, which is probably what most good parenting is. You just know when you need a change to try and become a team.

Two hours later the Escalade turned into a narrow and potholed driveway canopied by cedars and hemlocks. Lichen hung down from the branches and brushed the hood of the vehicle. Danielle drove slowly and the kids asked what was going on. All was quiet on the reception front.

Danielle killed the Cadillac and got out. Holy shit! The cabin was tinier than some of the tiny homes for the homeless in Portland. And the homeless had WiFi in their tiny homes!

She hustled the kids out and they carried their gear to the cabin. Danielle punched in the security code and they stepped inside. She switched on the lights. The décor was straight out Lewis and Clark’s cabin with some coastal watercolors and glass floats throw in for good measure.

“Kids, I have something to tell you.”

She explained. Their faces blanched. Their lips quivered. Their knees buckled. They marched into the cabin like prisoners of a cyber war that had kicked their ass. How long until they broke and went insane? Or ran away? They didn’t know how to run away, because they never ran.

They had never been without digital devices in their entire lives.

They were about to.

Steve Jobs wept.

Danielle stood at the door. The birds awakened from their stupor and lifted off. She smiled and turned around. She was going to tell the kids about the miracle.

They hadn’t even noticed she had gotten up. She looked at her kids. They were losers. Plain as that. A hard thing for a mom to admit, but it was true.

If they were losers, she was a loser because she had raised them or not raised them. They had no friends outside of Internet ones on gaming platforms, they never took walks or went to a park, they never talked to each other, they did nothing at school, nothing after school, nothing for their community, nothing around the house, nothing for their grandmother who lived a mile away, and nothing for their mother.

Despite receiving hefty allowances, none of them had purchased a single gift for their mother, not even a card.

Danielle shuddered at this and then remembered she hadn’t picked out a gift or card for her current boyfriend, a Tigard city planner she’d met online a few months ago. He’d put together a package of gifts that included a coupon for tennis lessons that he would teach himself. It was the nicest Christmas gift a man had ever given her and she apologized for not getting him anything. Busy, you know. Traffic and all that. Mom duties. Work. Soon, though, soon. She was working on it.

That was a lie.

What the hell was wrong with her family? With herself?

She hadn’t been raised with gadgets. She rode her bike to grade school. She’d served on student council in junior high. She was a cheerleader in high school with good grades and caroused at night. She completed a business degree at Portland State University while working for Target and waiting a table or two. She even had a dog in her 20s and walked and ran with it everywhere. Then came a serious boyfriend, marriage, a career in real estate she didn’t care a whit about, kids, bigger houses, more money, trips to corporate destinations, accumulation, more accumulation, affairs, divorce, dating, and now this Christmas morning where two knocked-out robins had knocked something into her. Or out.

Danielle thought she was going to cry. She had to get away from the house, Tigard. Right now. Bend was her usual getaway of choice, but she’d seen on the news that snow blocked all the passes. She whipped out her phone and looked up vacation rentals in Manzanita, where all the Tigard people went to visit the beach, but mostly shop and watch television.

Booked. Booked. Booked.

It was Christmas morning inside a spacious Tigard home at the end of a generic cul-de-sac named after a genocidal Italian mariner. Danielle and her three generic children, boy 14, girl 11, boy 8, lounged in the rec room as a superhero movie played on television. Everyone fiddled on their phones or tablets or watches, frequently two or three at the same time, if such a thing was possible, which it is. Look all around you.

A fake tree stood in the corner and strewn around its base was the shredded shiny papers that once wrapped thousands of dollars worth of new gadgets that the kids wordlessly fiddled on while simultaneously dumbing down their souls.

Danielle reached for a mug of cheap rose she’d just poured from a big box. Yes, it was morning, but dunking Costco cinnamon rolls in rose was simply divine. And it was Christmas after all. Bacon in the rose was next.

The kids’ loot was courtesy of their affluent parents, who were amicably divorced and parented in the modern style, meaning sheer indulgence. Danielle was a mortgage processor in Beaverton and her ex leased commercial real estate in buildings constructed upon dead wetlands throughout Washington County.

All of the new gadgets replaced the same old gadgets from the previous year. The kids had to have the best. It was all they talked about with their mom, that is when they even talked. They usually just ignored her, unless they wanted fast food delivered.

THUD! Something had smacked into the sliding glass door that opened up to a back yard that had gone to seed. Despite the thud, the kids never looked up from their gadgets.

Danielle got up from the couch and carried her wine over to the door. She saw a robin splayed on the moss-covered patio, writhing, then not writhing.

THUD! Another robin walloped into the glass and hit the patio. It was twitching.

Danielle shook and gasped, but didn’t drop the wine. She slugged the rose, set down the mug, and tried to open the door. It wouldn’t budge. She kept trying. Nothing. She didn’t realize all the debris stuck under the runners made door movement impossible.

No one had opened the door in years.