Animal Fables IV: Zebra

Once upon a time, there lived a con­fused zebra called Zelda.

Zelda had never got the whole black and white thing. Stripes. She simply didn’t under­stand stripes. In her opin­ion, zebras looked quite like horses, so why couldn’t she be the same col­our as a horse? A nice unad­ven­tur­ous shade of brown, maybe? Or why not just smudge the black and white together to cre­ate a faintly unin­spir­ing shade of grey? She felt that would suit her much better.

So, like any young zebra would do when faced with one of life’s more dif­fi­cult dilem­mas, Zelda went to talk to her mother about it.

Mother zebra was keen to dis­suade her daugh­ter against mak­ing such an alarm­ing change in her nat­ural col­our­ing. “Don’t for­get, dear,” she said, speak­ing in her most calm­ing par­ental tone, “Horses are quite unre­mark­able. And if you look like a horse, you might just get dragged away to the glue factory.”

Neither of them believed the line about the glue fact­ory, of course; that was just an old zebra’s tale.

“But I’ve got a bet­ter idea!” said mother. And with that, she pro­duced two tins of body paint — one labelled ‘Bril­liant White’ and the other ‘Darkest Black’. She grabbed a small paint brush between her teeth and, instruct­ing her daugh­ter to close her eyes and stand abso­lutely still, she star­ted paint­ing her all over.

It was so relax­ing that Zelda, our con­fused zebra, drif­ted off into a gentle snooze. When she awoke and looked down at her­self, she was amazed. She had com­pletely changed. All her black stripes were now gleam­ing white, while her white stripes had turned to deep­est black.

“Oh, mother! It’s per­fect! It’s so vibrant, strik­ing and … stripey!”

Zelda felt like a brand new zebra. And she was, of course. She was a brand new zebra with a coat of black and white stripes.

Zelda’s mother looked on with a proud smile, and quietly put away her dry, unused paint brush.

The End.

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