From Daughter of Endtimes

My paternal family begins in escape. Guns, knives, hawk feather, car—one word, we’ll be gone. Until that day, exhaust smells like work. He lets me know it’s time by backing up a metal beast into the carport, cloudy hands cradling our little house. The early morning freeway of Southern California coos, my father revs an engine until it screams down, down the hallway into my bedroom, and I yell from bed that I’m awake already so he doesn’t have to break some pollution code. Trevor yells back to me, his teenage daughter, well if you’re awake already, why don’t you come help me drain the brakes? Since it is true that I am already awake, that I am cold enough inside our home to see my breath in the winter months, and in the other months I am a child with tight fists, waiting, I oblige my father. In the way exhaust binds us in this ritual, I know we are as exalted as the beater chariot that will take us from the city when it’s time. I emerge from my room knowing my father has a Volvo driver door open for me, which he has learned after bruised years not to close on my leg in haste to get us on the road. I could punish him later for each truck door shut on me in the early years of his fatherhood, but that will be when we are both well enough to tease, that will be when we are safe in some canyon as Los Angeles burns to the south. I have pumped the brakes so many times already that as a teenager I rest my eyes, listen for my father’s words of go or now, and I drop my head into the god we know, a large Volvo steering wheel with braided plastic or leather, and pray, which means sleep, which means for a second know that today we stay. Our house doesn’t know a vacuum for months, but our vehicles get the purr of a Snap-on shop vac, this beautiful red-and-white robot made like they used to be, a thick-funneled machine I can wrap my arms around, and sometimes do. After the brakes there is cereal, sometimes with a scoop of vanilla ice cream because there aren’t women around to tell us not to, and there is orange juice and vodka for Trevor before 1995, but that is done by the time I’m a teenager, done with by what is now, which is the future, which will be closer to the end than I could have foreseen. Boom. But before that end, many things will already be gone forever with the drinking. We will have learned that men can change. My father will not be as hard on me. He will not tell me do it again every time I do anything. I won’t have to practice, demonstrate. He will have