Raimer Writes in Tonnage

A stern, religious father raises his sons in a strict faith of his own design. During an ocean storm in which their lives are at stake, he finds genuine enlightenment. They come across a hermit on a hidden island and make a new life. Can they retain integrity and purity while devotees swarm to their blessed way of life?

The two windows hang agape, painted paneled glass frames sticking to the concrete facade, exposing inhabitants to the oven of basalt air, rubble in the taste of it through cilia scorched sinuses praising the Moment with each effort of ascetic inhalation. It’s the good pride—not for penance but for spiritual benefit. Father and his boys don’t shrink from the challenge of it, that Warrenport heat from its sand salted roads of tar calcified by oxidizing tripping crack traps in pedestrian ways. Even dandelions quit and piss off, leaving seeds to fail in this municipal oversight of a tax zone designated ‘Access Road #3’. The stink of the seaport to the east arises like a 3 AM drunk from the fetid low tide, its caustic flatulence, the smog of diesel trawlers, imposing His foul breath, too familiar, into the ‘living unit - 2C’ of the immovable Tunch tribe, and stinging the eyeballs of these resilient believers who drink in the immediacy of ‘God in everything’ like home pruno. The head is Father, and his sons: The Good, The Honest, The Gifted, The Righteous, The Heart, The Toiler and the sleeping birthing mother of these six boys still using her given weak name of Deirdre. It’s all a manifestation of the Primacy according to Father’s homemade truth discovered daily by, as the kin call themselves, the Brethren of the Empirical: coming to them in first-hand bless-ed experiences by the Great Director. Religion is not something to be learned from imperfect clergy with agendas: it is to be discerned directly through rapt attention and diligence. No one else is the gatekeeper to special access for ‘where is God not?’
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