The Hermaphrodite

Whilst I was at university I lived next door to some strange neighbours. The husband had one arm that was about a foot longer than the other and hung limply at his side while his wife was just obese. They often did strange things; such as on one Sunday afternoon they loaded up their car with all manner of objects for hours and then took them all back inside again. This was the most pointless activity I had ever seen. Though these characters were funny to me seeing as I have never really grown out of school yard humour (no one really does) it was their child that interested my housemates and I. We were sure their child was a hermaphrodite.

There were many reasons why this creature puzzled us. For starters; its mix of female and male characteristics and physical (one hesitates to use the word) attributes. This thing had the body of a woman but sounded like a teenage boy whose voice is breaking. It had strange hair like Art Garfunkel. It played guitar and often rocked out to Ozzy Osborne. We spent hours trying to figure out what it was. We even found out where it worked so we could look on the nametag to see whether we could tell from the name but it never wore a nametag. This became an obsession with us. I even had conversations with it as we both hung out the washing but it never brought out any tell tale underwear. We often found ourselves looking a little too hard sometimes at them. In the end I think the neighbours thought we were the odd ones.