The story so far: It’s Christmas Eve, and Rafiki the gorilla and Bomani the meerkat, residents of the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo, have been transformed into humans. They’ve made a new friend, a young boy named Micah.

Micah sighed. Thinking about his parents often made him sad, and he didn’t want to be sad. Not today, on Christmas Eve.

He looked at his new friends, mustered a smile.

“Hey, you want to see pictures from the zoo? “ he asked. “My dad took me last summer before he left for Afghanistan. We took a ton of pictures.”

Rafiki hid a smile. It would be like looking through a family album.

“Sure,” he said.

Micah pulled a photo album from his bookshelf. He sat on the floor, opened the album, began sifting through the pages.

“Here’s the giraffes,” he said. “They’re my favorite. You can feed them.”

He pointed out snow leopards, grizzly bears and a moose, then stopped on a page of photos taken in the zoo’s Primate World.

“This is the only boy gorilla,” Micah said, pointing. “His name is, let’s see, it’s Rafiki.”

He tilted his head, looked at Rafiki.

“Hey, that’s right. Just like you. You’ve got a gorilla’s name. That’s pretty funny.”

Rafiki took the album, studied his picture. I am a handsome devil, he thought.

Micah was still looking at Rafiki.

At his rough features. The broad shoulders. His hairy arms. And there was something about his eyes. …

“You’ve got a gorilla’s  name,” Micah repeated, trailing off.

And somehow he knew. It couldn’t be, but it was.

“You ARE Rafiki,” Micah said. “I mean, this Rafiki.” He pointed to the photo.

Rafiki and Bomani looked at each other. Bomani nodded. Tell him, he seemed to be telling Rafki.

“Well, yes,” Rafiki told Micah. “That’s me.”

“But that’s not possible, right?” Micah said. “I mean, how?”

“It’s kind of complicated,” Rafiki said.

“And you?” Micah asked Bomani. “Are you an animal, too? What are you?”

“Meerkat,” Bomani said with an almost embarassed smile.

Micah started giggling.

“Cool,” he said.

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