Buster Wanksniffer, the Cross-Dressing Teenage Archaeologist

To clarify, the following is a work of fiction. This writing exercise involved a group of people writing along the same outrageous premise. We passed around one sheet of paper allowing each person in the group to contribute to a premise from which we would write. We folded the sheet back after adding each section so no-one could see the other details of the story we'd be writing. Between each pass of the sheet, a group member added one of the following elements:

Name

Age

Place

Time

Occupation

Something they are doing

A problem they are facing

Our premise was as follows:

Buster Wanksniffer

14 years old

In Chester Zoo

At 4:55pm

He's an archaeologist

He's smoking a cigar

He's a transvestite.

For the record, I did not put forward the “problem” section. Some of the group are a bit “old-school”, and although being a transvestite would probably come with its problems, we agreed that the fetish is not a problem in itself. Also, I acknowledge that a transvestite is someone who cross-dresses for sexual thrills and a transsexual is someone who wants to change, or already has changed, their gender. I got this wrong during the exercise.

Gently, gently, like the woman he wishes he was, he brushes the sand away from the crevice emerging stubbornly in the pit.

Buster is fortunate that a kid his age got the placement at all- professional archaeologists have been denied entry to the zoo as to not disturb the colobus monkeys. Mating season or not, Buster has a deadline. The primates are cordoned off in another enclosure as Buster digs, scrapes and tentitively brushes against the bone structure, emerging proud from the floor. It's an emergence, a transformation.

Just like he is.

He pushes the wig's blonde fringe away from his eyes again, noting the smaller details of his life changing- beyond the dress and the knee-high boots, regardless of the lycra and mascara- even his brush-strokes were becoming more effeminate.

He felt the cigar balanced him out- he is not a transexual, nor does he want to be. He's not a man either, yet. He's a boy with a tool, in a number of ways.

He sucked on the cigar, lost in thought. The ribcage of the find- a mere 65 million years old- was protruding now, like his own in his crop-top.

The patrons may have stared, but the monkeys were indifferent, free from prejudice. And they were the ones put out by his intrusion, displaced by Buster's foray into the zoo's Jurassic past.