After a long and heat laden evening lounging and laughing on Prospect Ave., pretending again that he isn’t gay, Junior drops an old tire to the street (out of the same boredom that compelled him to pick it up in the first place), says goodbye very seriously to José and Mikey, then heads back to his apartment on Westchester to sup with his family. Mangu con queso blanco y salami awaits, topped with thinly sliced and vinegar soaked red onions. A cup of soda, maybe. As he takes the elevator, he can smell that the West Africans on the third floor are cooking “aketche,” their own take on dolled up cassava, a crushed cousin of mangu, though Junior is loathe to admit the entwined history of West Africa and Dominicans, the shared culture and history, not to mention the blood. He doesn’t know the word aketche nor plan to know it either, does not like entanglement but did read in the paper that DNA is held together by something similar. He’s considering this braiding of acids and histories, if only generally, or not considering it really, as a general rule, as he opens the door to the apartment. The first thing he sees is his mother, but then she’s gone, and where she was stands his sister.
Then his mother, then his sister, both or either smiling or furrowing eyebrows or neither. Confused, Junior does as he usually would, and heads straight for his room, turning on AIM. A few messages in and he hears someone calling to him from the kitchen. He can’t tell who it is, but he says he’s busy either way. There’s a gentle knock on the door, then a head pokes in. “Hey, Junior, it’s Mom and Sis, we decided to become the same person, to save on food and electricity. Come eat.” The smell of mangu beckons him out of his chair and into the kitchen, where this new person sits, neither mother nor sister nor both, but all three at once.
Over dinner, Junior is at first horribly irked by the whole idea, to the point of severe itchiness, but soon starts to see a silver lining to it, an abstract aloe. Really, this new mom-sibling person has abandoned the shyness of his original mother, always so ensconced in her own hidden feelings, and also has foregone the rude haughtiness of his sister, her shrill demands, as if only the best traits had been kept for this new person-thing. The silver aloe lining starts to rust and flake, however, or at least dry up, when Junior opens the freezer and is greeted by the unmistakable smell of the idea of his mother in a corner crying, this idea placed gingerly by the frozen peas, and the notion of his sister demanding money and coming home late, this wrapped up in plastic and frozen beneath some popsicles. In a huff, Junior pulls it all out of the freezer, defrosts it, and then fries the whole lot of it in a spicy mix of adobo and Sazón, while his sister-mother looks on in confusion. He eats it quickly, unsure of his intentions.
When his father comes home, Junior is lying on the couch, full to the bursting and burping a storm of angst, listening to his new hybrid family talk to itself about its own past squabbles, and Junior is excited for his father to sort things out with his big voice and hairy hands. Mr. Prince Enrique Tejada has no time for foolishness, be it sass talk or two people becoming one. Not under his roof. Who pays the bills around here? Only he can say who becomes two or one or any number. But, rather than scold the two (one?), or even say anything about it at all, he walks directly up to them, or her, or it, and just slides right into them (her?), smiling like a kid, until he disappears, or finally appears, but anyway some kind of “-pears,” maybe a new one, but doesn’t decry anything as foolishness at all, not even a little, and then together, the three-cum-one exclaim, “Damn, that feels good! Junior get in here!” Junior goes to his room and shuts the door, sulking.
From outside he hears his family say, “We came here to NYC to be closer, don’t just pout in there on AIM all night.” Junior puts on some music loudly but still hears them say, “And anyway, think about the savings! Don’t you want that phone? We really can’t afford to be four people. One person will be much more affordable. We can share the phone. And we can rent out the extra rooms for spending money. Did somebody say Applebees?” When he meekly comes out to use the bathroom, Junior sees that, during his father’s merging, something fell to the floor and no one has taken the time to pick it up. Upon inspection, he sees that it’s his father’s bigotry and homophobia, squirming around like a jelly fish. In anger and desperation, Junior picks it up, boils it, and then looks for his dog, Carpet, to feed it to. Carpet is nowhere to be found though, just an idea of him peeing on the floor, an idea left behind the torn up couch.
“Damnit,” Junior says, dancing around the apartment to avoid being pulled into his family’s sphere of influence, “you took the dog, too?”
“And the cat!” his family exclaims, and for the first time he notices a peculiar growling-meowness to their voice.
The next day in school, his guidance counselor admonishes him for not wanting to be more a part of his family. She is surprised that he doesn’t want to celebrate his own culture, as if in the Dominican Republic everyone spends their time merging with everyone else all the time. “You’re a mixed society,” she says. “I think this resistance has something, just maybe, to do with your feelings about Haitians? No? Anyway, try merging with something around here, just for kicks,” she says, “Maybe you’ll like it.” But Junior, more than anything, is not afraid of joining, but instead of the idea that when he does, the thing that gets left behind, pushed out and dropped to the floor, will not be some small fault, but will instead be all of him, to be packed away in the freezer and eaten later. For fun, though, he merges with the chair, just a little bit, and notes that it kind of tickles. Then he sees that something has fallen out of him. In his head he describes the feeling: outside, everything collapses, but in a way that you can’t feel because it’s so wrapped up in itself — as if it isn’t all of yourself that gets pushed out and left behind, but finally everything else.
Dolan Morgan lives and writes in Greenpoint, Brooklyn 
