The Zebra

THE ZEBRA
    Once a zebra found itself in a herd of black horses and white horses.
    The zebra watched the black horses and the white horses carefully for clues about how it might fit into the herd and noticed that although they seemed to spend most of their time moving about at random as they grazed, at the end of the day the white horses generally moved closer together and the black horses generally moved closer together as well. The zebra wondered why that should be.
    The horses, for their part, wondered about the zebra in return. First of all, what color was it exactly? Was it black with white stripes, or was it white with black stripes? How could one be both black and white at the same time? Could one change one’s stripes at will? Was the zebra trying to hide something about itself, the white horses asked each other and the black horses asked each other? Was the zebra pretending to be something it was not and only half succeeding?
    The zebra knew it couldn’t do anything about the stripes it was born with. When it first noticed the difference between itself and the horses, it had in fact wished to be entirely one color or entirely the other color by turns, hoping that way to escape the scrutiny of at least half the herd for a while. The wishing hadn’t produced the desired effect, though, and the zebra had ultimately decided there was nothing it could do about its stripes. Why should it want to change them anyway? They were what made a zebra a zebra, weren’t they?
    There was also nothing to be done, it concluded, about the way the horses behaved when it was around. Some within each group pretended the zebra simply didn’t exist, or so it seemed from their habit of furtively watching it but quickly averting their eyes if the zebra chanced to gaze in their direction. Others seemed to have decided that the zebra, because it looked different, wasn’t worth the bother of getting to know, let alone look at. Still others couldn’t take their eyes off its unique color patterns, seeing the zebra as exotic and alluring, an object of fantasies. All of these attitudes made the zebra feel disheartened and misunderstood.
    At day’s end, when the white horses moved nearer to each other and the black horses moved nearer to each other and the zebra found itself alone once more, it could hear the horses of each color asking themselves the same questions over and over. Was the zebra black with white stripes? Was the zebra white with black stripes?
    “Why not both at once?” the zebra wanted to ask. “Why not both as one?”