Ex Chapter 16 - Dorsal Grellman - a symptom of the world we have created

Those who encountered Dorsal Grellman fleetingly as he unleashed his unusual cruelty upon them, might reasonably have assumed that he had been born in ancient Sparta, abandoned on a mountainside to perish, only to be discovered and raised by a pack of wolves. It was impossible to imagine that this determinedly poisonous, emotionally feral bastard had been the progeny of parents who once loved and cherished him, as opposed to beasts who slaughtered and fed upon the still beating hearts of their victims.

There is an ill conceived assumption that only an upbringing redolent with abuse could create a Dorsal Grellman. It isn’t always violence which begats violence - in Dorsal’s case it was the withdrawal of love which had hitherto been unconditional. He was not to know that there was a “best before” date stamped on his parent’s affections, an expiration date on their emotional investment when they would withdraw all and leave him bankrupt.

A professional couple who cared, perhaps a little too much for the facade of normality, Jester and Bethany Grellman built a pack of cards to reside in and placed baby Dorsal on the top floor. Jester was a futures broker doomed to constantly explain what he did to people who only heard the words “die, die, die” when they looked at his large round face. Bethany fashioned intricate jewelry from the bleached ligaments and skulls of rodents which she sold from a market stall in Bermondsey. These weren’t real jobs, but they were a symptom of the world we had created and there was no will to discover a cure. Dorsal was permanently embraced, stowed in a papoose on his father’s back, wallowing in the shallow of his mother’s arms, he was their tiny vision.

It was with a sense of unaccustomed clarity therefore that one evening, over a glass of chianti and some bratwurst the Grellman’s realized that their love for each other had been lost in the space between their own vacuous words. When the polarity was reversed in their marriage from attract to repel, the vortex created by the beating of their tiny insectile wings disappeared and there was nothing to prevent Dorsal from falling. He was falling still.

Dorsal’s arms were outstretched but to his parents he had become a hazard to be navigated around. He learnt that there was a poverty in love and a purity in hatred, that if he was to survive he must climb onto the shoulders of his victims to avoid becoming one himself. When he was placed with an aunt he had never met before, Dorsal watched his parents build new families which excluded him. He had been placed in his aunt’s home for a month whilst his parent’s “found their feet” and the month never came to an end. He had become an invisible giant with eyes that would never forgive and his parents quickly filed him under “ex son”.