1. My granddaughter has a toy I’ve come to hate. It’s one of those touch-activated gizmos with dozens of animal sounds: tap a picture of a cow and it moos, pat a horse and it whinnies. But touch a zebra and it sounds like a squeaky pump with hiccups.
  2. That sound was so strange I asked my son-in-law, who spent two years in Kenya, if zebras had a characteristic sound. He said they did; they chirped. He said it was easily recognizable.
  3. A “zebra” is also a term used in medicine to refer to an extremely rare disease. The catchphrase, “when you hear hoofbeats, think of horses, not zebras” is something both my husband and I learned as med students. It means, think of ordinary diseases first before jumping to an obscure entity—in someone with a fever and muscle aches, rule out the flu instead of malaria or dengue fever.
  4. The last time I saw a zebra was a good twenty-five years ago, when we took our girls to the zoo in Providence. I’d like to show one to my granddaughter one day. They are fun for small children to identify; their stripes are so distinctive.
  5. Scientists have long speculated why zebras have those stripes. Some have suggested they have a role in temperature regulation, others that they protect the animals from predators by making it difficult to single out and capture one zebra out of a group.
  6. A group of zebras is called a dazzle.
  7. Recent research suggests another theory: a zebra’s stripes may prevent it from getting bitten by blood-seeking flies. A 2019 study found that flies approach zebras and horses at the same rate, but far fewer of them land on the zebras. On a continent where serious insect-borne diseases are endemic, a zebra’s stripes may provide an evolutionary advantage.
  8. I thought about zebras a lot last fall, when my granddaughter, then only seven-months old, was repeatedly rushed to the hospital because of intractable seizures. To stop them, she had to be drugged into a coma and intubated. Early in the process of figuring out what was wrong, my son-in-law, roiling with anxiety, read through half the internet, and settled on the worst possible alternative; he decided my granddaughter had Dravet Syndrome, a devastating genetic form of epilepsy that results in developmental delays and early death.
  9. Zebras are in the genus Equus, which includes horses. Related via a common ancestor, they superficially look like horses, but are a completely different species.
  10. I calmed down my panicked son-in-law, reassuring him his first child did not have Dravet Syndrome. It was so rare, I said, and so early in the course of things. Leaning toward my husband, I whispered, Horses, not zebras.
  11. My granddaughter was under the care of three smart physicians who were methodically studying all the possible horses this could be. This was medicine, there was a process, a systematic procedure for making diagnoses, one that my non-physician son-in-law was ignorant of; it was too soon to be trotting out the zebras.
  12. Zebras cannot be domesticated; they are more aggressive than horses—and far more dangerous.
  13. After months of uncertainty, my granddaughter’s genetic tests came back; she had a rare mutation in one of her chromosomes resulting in defective sodium channels in her brain. A pediatric seizure specialist eventually confirmed it was Dravet Syndrome. My son-in-law, by googling her symptoms, had called it correctly. My husband and I were gutted; this was not a horse, not even an unusual horse. We had a zebra on our hands.
  14. The investigators of the fly study speculated that the zebra’s stripes trick the fly’s low-resolution vision. From afar, the fly interprets a zebra’s black and white coloration as solid gray, so it thinks it is seeing a gray horse. But as the fly moves in closer, the zebra’s diagonal stripes become apparent.
  15. The fly, in its short-sighted arrogance, becomes disoriented by the zebra’s contrasting stripes. It buzzes around—bereft—while the zebras run and chirp in a dazzle, their inscrutable stripes shimmering in the African sun.
    ___

Lynda Rushing is a former pathologist turned labor attorney who now writes. Her creative nonfiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Solstice Magazine, Saranac Review, Under the Sun, and elsewhere. Formerly from Honolulu, Hawaii, she currently lives in northern Massachusetts with her husband and mother.

Artwork by Char Gardner