Cabin Fever
- Dec 29, 2025
- 6 min read
Thank goodness work starts tomorrow.” Mom tapped the turn-around pole and about-faced toward the car. “I don’t think I can handle this stress without a distraction.”
The next morning, the Witch woke us up before the sun. I needed to let Mom run out her zoomies so she could behave around our new collies, but how? The beach was bound to rile her up more than the run would calm her down, and I had no idea if escaping the Law yesterday was just a fluke.
“Let’s not run at the beach today,” I coached. “I don’t like all the new signs that are hanging out down there these days.”
“Me neither,” Mom said. “Where do you want to go?”
“How about the Haunted Highway?”
Back in ancient times, the Haunted Highway used to be a road for cars. These days, bushes crowded in too close for a car to squeeze through and roots had chewed up most of the pavement, but you could still smell the rusty skeletons of old wrecks buried in the bushes like a forgotten bone. The ghosts blew in with the morning fog and swirled featherlike through the brush until the sun shined them away around lunch time.
“That trail’s at the other end of town,” Mom said. “The shelter in place order says that we have to stay within 5 miles of home.”
We usually run six miles before work, but I couldn’t remember if six was more or less than five. “Five miles by mapp or by car?” I asked.
“Good point. The trailhead is probably only 4 as the crow flies, but then we keep running south, which will take us even farther from the house. The turnaround is certainly more than 5 miles from here, no matter how you count it.”
If we got it wrong, would Mom drop dead from the poison air the moment she crossed over the five-mile barrier? But staying home was a different kind of poison. “Aw, that’s just another one of the Witch’s lies,” I decided. “She’s trying to trap you again.”
“No, I think it’s real this time. People are getting really grumpy about it on social media.”
“But there’s no one out there but ghosts. They won’t mind if you have a deadly virus because they’re already dead.”
“You’re right. I think it’s fair to measure the 5 miles from where we park, so long as we stay within town limits,” Mom said in the same voice she used to get our stories straight in Death Valley.
“Do they have town limits in the woods?” I asked.
“Who knows. The important thing is that we don’t know, so we have a plausible answer if somebody asks.”
We arrived at first light. The car stopped in the milky shadows a few steps from where the road became trail. Mom hit a button on the windowsill and all the door locks thumped in unison without triggering the horn. We looked both ways and scurried into the trees, away from spying windows.
The mist swallowed the pitter-patter of my steps as I ran through a forest as silent as a grave. Even the cough-drop smell of the eucalyptus trees was muted by the gloom.
The trees gave way and the trail opened up like a balcony as Mom’s wrist beeped the first mile. On a less ghostly day, this balcony would give me one last look at My Hometown before the trail swooshed back into the forest. After that, there were nothing but hills humping one behind another in a long chain of unbroken wilder-ness all the way to Ellay. On days like today, when My Hometown was swallowed by mist, you could pretend like humans never chopped up the wilder-ness to begin with.
Between the second and third wrist beep, we rounded the last shrub at the top of the hill and the world fell away in front of me. Far below, the ocean bit into the land and swallowed everything between here and Japan. I had seen the ocean a million times, of course, but looking at it from up here on the Haunted Highway always felt like discovering the End of the World for the first time.
“Should we keep going?” Mom asked.
“Is it too far?” I looked downhill at the road that would take us effortlessly away from all the mean signs and snot-nosey neighbors. We could let the hill carry us all the way to the dead spot at the bottom, where the Witch couldn’t tell us the mean things the internet had to say, and we could pretend everything was back to the way it was before.
“It’s too far to go all the way down and back before work,” Mom said. I couldn’t tell if she was planning an escape or just counting.
“Do we have to go back?” I looked longingly toward the ocean. Despite waves relentlessly pushing its boundaries every day since the beginning of time, the tide always retreated in the end.
“There’s no law that says we have to go all the way to the bottom,” Mom said, the ocean pulling on her eyes as much as it was on mine.
“Isn’t there a law that says we can’t go all the way to the bottom?”
“Anyone who sees us will be just as guilty as we are.” Mom tested a first step toward rebellion.
We stood on the edge, leaning toward the wilder-ness for a long moment. The Witch ruined it with a jarring clang.
Mom jumped, then sagged. “Who am I kidding?” She turned away. “There’s no escape. Not anymore. Come on, let’s go to work.”
Mom turned and let fate pull us back downhill toward the Stuck House, which was about to be transformed into an office. I couldn’t wait to see the metamorphosis, but for someone whose greatest wish was about to be granted, Mom didn’t seem to be in such a hurry.
After her third shower in as many days, Mom tore the plastic off of a box and pulled out a laptop like a rabbit out of a hat. I stood in the kitchen bright-eyed and waggy-tailed, waiting for my first assignment.
She reverently laid the shiny slab on the kitchen table with a voilà flourish. “That’s it! We’re at work now.” She cracked open the lid and the laptop made a warm, welcoming sound. “I’m liking this new commute.”
“What do you mean?” I asked, trying to reach the tabletop with my nose.
“Our work is inside this laptop now. We can take it anywhere we go.”
“Oh phew! I thought we would be grounded in the Stuck House forever. Where should we go first? I vote for Utah. Or Oregon. Do you think Lily misses me very badly?”
“It was more a figure of speech,” Mom said like I was the Weather Jinx bringing rain to her parade. “The whole reason we can work from home is because we’re not allowed out of our homes. But look!” She kicked out a leg. “Sweatpants! No more tyranny of buttons and non-elastic waistbands. Isn’t it heaven?”
“Dogs don’t wear pants,” I reminded her. “That’s why we’re so happy all the time.”
Still wearing the heavenly smile of someone with a wonderful secret, Mom turned back to the laptop. It greeted her with a soft, soothing glow.
“So wait, the only time we get to go outside is when we’re inside that laptop?” I asked. “Aren’t laptops, like, extra big, mega-powerful Witches?”
But Mom didn’t answer because her attention was already trapped inside the screen.
When your job is to supervise an office full of people, and your Stuck House is your office, work is much less exciting. I spent the workday on my Mom-watching chair with nothing to do but study the faces Mom makes when she has long, meaningful conversations with her laptop using only her fingers and eyes.
As time went by, there were other signs that Mom was losing it. She started talking to the laptop like it was a person, asking it questions out loud and making gestures like it would help the screen understand her better. You can bark at a screen like it’s your friend, but a laptop can’t scratch your butt while it tells you how handsome you are. When I butted my head under the table to make sure she was okay, Mom got annoyed and said I was interrupting.
She couldn’t help it. It was in her nature to get annoyed, and I was the only one around.
Want to keep reading? Grab Oscar’s book, No Place Like Alone on Amazon.
