Pay attention. Something amazing is about to happen.
It is a chilly Maine morning, which, when the morning is in Maine, might be a large variety of mornings, given that many mornings in Maine could be considered chilly. Perhaps it is early spring. Or maybe fall is blooming red on the mountain. Heck, it could even be a winter morning, warm compared to all the other mornings huddled in around it. Regardless, it is Maine and the house is set very far from the road—the driveway wends through a wood for perhaps half a mile before the house, the exterior a happy yellow in the process of being repainted a lady bird brown, peeks out from behind the trees. Eventually, sometime in the future (though who knows exactly when), this shy house will smile from behind its mothers’ skirts to greet a packed car inching its way up the driveway. But that is not the amazing thing about to happen. Presently, no such car exists. The house says hello to no one. The sun itself is just cresting the tops of the trees, the only witness and still sleepy. It is early, even for a morning.
The yard is strewn with ladders and buckets and tarps, which makes sense given the apparent renovation. Next to the fuse box, just inside the garage, stands a woman whose wild hair curls from under a knit beanie, static shock in the crisp air. She is blessed with a prominent nose (no delicacy here) and a neck that’s dancing grace (all delicacy here), which is, at present, wrapped within a scarf. She closes her eyes and inhales deeply. Woodsmoke on the air. The wind gives her goose bumps.
She holds a drill, squeezes the trigger to test the battery, the electric whir cutting into the sound of a woods waking up. “Okay,” she says, as though she is gearing up to do something difficult. “Okay.” She opens the fuse box and shuts off the master switch, the red lever at the very top. She can hear the crackle as the power leaves the lines along her roof; everything is still for a moment as she stares up, listening, making sure she can’t hear any more power. Only birdsong.
Now, one might expect her to operate the drill on some part of the house, given all the contextual clues. But her face changes, tentative to hard. She puts the drill down and walks through the interior garage door, stopping at a workbench along the way to interface with a coffee can full of batteries, some of them old and crusty and some of them brand-new, shining like jewels from un-use. She hauls the vessel onto her hip as she enters the house, conspicuously door-alarm-less. Her gaze flicks to every battery-supported piece of technology as she checks things off the list in her mind.
She can’t think of anything else. She’s gotten it all. She lets out a breath she doesn’t realize she’s been holding, deflating with relief only for a second before squaring her shoulders and facing the rest of her house.
She tears it apart. She begins a honey badger search for any device that one might consider “smart”: she rips a thermostat off the wall, hauls a television outside, adds her laptop and phone to the careful pile, lovingly crafted of expensive technology and split firewood. When it becomes apparent she needs more fuel, she grabs a dining room chair from her set of six and breaks the legs off it with her bare hands, popping each rung from between the top rail and the bottom with a delicious snap, a smile creeping across her face: relief, as though cracking her knuckles.
When the pile is complete, her house stripped bare of anything that can connect to the internet, she pours herself the peatiest Scotch she has. She grabs a respirator and a can of gasoline and tucks a box of long hearth matches under her arm. Woodsmoke. Woodsmoke on the air. A portent. And after she drenches the pile, each motherboard and solid-state drive and display cable soaked well beyond recoverable function and smelling noxious; after looking once more to the fresh morning sky and giving a toast to the errant cloud above; after taking a decadent sip of expensive alcohol and fastening her respirator securely over her nose and mouth, she, calmly and deliberately, sets it all on fire.