"The next morning as Emily unlocked her door to leave for work she glanced over at the To-Do list. There scrawled on the list was “Take the package from under the floor board in the kitchen area. Give it to the man with a black leather cap on the subway A Line."

I was twenty when I bought the car. A pale blue sedan, scratched along the doors, but the price was right. The salesman at the used lot called it “a starter car, nothing fancy, but reliable.” And he was right—it ran smoothly, better than I expected for something that had seen its share of miles. It became my freedom—drives to class, late-night grocery runs, weekend trips out of town. I didn’t think of it as anything more than metal and wheels, until the night the rain

I didn’t know what to do. I looked at Leo, he was looking at his feet and simply standing there. And then she talked, “Do not go to the little red house.”

But the tiger machine, that was a different story. It took an experienced machine attendant to keep it working. The machine growled and rumbled throughout the day, the oven in its belly needing constant stoking with chunks of coal large as a man’s hand.