Uncle wasn’t really my uncle. He was a Jamaican man who ran the laundromat down the street. My Trinidadian parents, though they were no longer around, had endowed me with enough brought-upsies to know not to call Uncle by his first name (which I had long forgotten anyway). So, like any good Caribbean child, I just called him Uncle. 

The laundromat also wasn’t really his laundromat—it belonged to his children. But they had moved on with their lives, and I never saw them around. The business had failed a long time ago, which was no surprise; most houses and apartments were furnished with fully automated chore processors and robot housekeepers, rendering laundromats obsolete. When I asked Uncle why he still bothered to take care of the place, he told me that he wanted his grandchildren to have something tangible to hold on to. The world, he said, was lost in the intangible. 

To some extent, I understood what he meant. By the 2050s, we had made the final integrations with technology. Neural network microchips were the norm: invisible threads of electricity beat through young people’s bodies, providing a steady stream of music, news, entertainment, everything we could ever need. Renewable and humane energy sources were built; universal income was ubiquitous, and reparations had been granted to the colonies. Structures of domination had been largely done away with, swiftly and brutally, giving way to an era of peace. Art, in theory, flourished, but it was mostly made by the chips inside us rather than the hosts themselves. Most people were free to just spend their day existing and consuming, consuming and existing. It was an odd sort of freedom. 

Uncle, I suppose, was chasing his own kind of freedom. But his was not the freedom of automation or microchips. His was a freedom of sound. 

Every morning, the oily serenades of old-time reggae splattered through the air in front of his store, like plantain frying. Uncle had a stash of that good music. Songs recorded by real people—a rarity in this day and age—whom I could envision gyrating on stage in front of a rabid crowd or singing their hearts out in an island studio in some far-away time. One could sniff out the source of the righteous tunes to Uncle’s ancient-looking stereo, which propped open the door to the store. It was a small, metal box with a comically oversized antenna sprouting from the top, fishing for signals it would never find. There was always a cassette whirring around inside, wringing out the rich melodies. The stereo’s worn-down tweeters struggled to handle the skanking heat. The whole scene was quite enchanting. 

The laundromat itself, however, was a bit less so. The walls had faded into a sun-bleached-algae colour, and the floor was peppered with mildew and dust. Beige washing machines and dryers stood in neat rows, threaded together by a mysterious configuration of clunky aluminium tubing. A lone vending machine moped in a corner, its spiralling metal ribcage lined with junk food brands that had gone out of business years ago. Small wooden shelves lined the walls and supported a few flourishing plants; I always liked to think Uncle took special care of these himself. The whole place smelled faintly of oxtail and detergent. 

But the drab scenery was not unique. New York was not as lively and happening as it had been during our parents’ time. There had been a mass exodus after  Manhattan was consumed by the Atlantic Ocean. The Upper East and West Sides were  now a conservation ground where all manner of wild fish and sea creatures spent their days zipping through floating designer furniture and empty picture frames—makeshift racetracks. 

And, personally, I didn’t mind the emptiness. I was an awkward kid. Always had a hard time making friends my age. That’s probably why Uncle and I got along so well. I admired the secrets tucked away between his decades (his Blackness was resolute, making it impossible to tell how old he really was), and he found my youthful naivety humorous if, at times, irreverent. I met him my first day in the neighbourhood, and, for my  first few months in the city, I visited him almost every weekend. 

Uncle was always in the same spot in the middle of the room, perched on a red leather chair with yellow stuffing poking out. His burgundy fedora shielded, from the fluorescent ceiling lights, the cabal of  purple moles on his cheekbones. A pathetic-looking fan sat beside him, struggling to cool the air. The little breeze it did give off caused his  oversized satin shirt to billow over his potbelly, making him look pregnant. If this scene  wasn’t enough to know he was West Indian, the baker’s dozen of laminated Jamaican  flags draped loosely around the store hammered the point home. I often felt that, humming along to his cassettes and surrounded by the anachronistic hallmarks of the  laundromat, Uncle seemed freer than any of us. 

One afternoon, as the yolk of the setting sun began to crack through the doorway, a particularly sweet and sticky song eased out of the stereo. As I got up to leave, I used the implant in my left ear to look up some information about the artist. In a few seconds, a small holographic album cover was hovering before my nose. The image on the front was of a beautiful, shirtless young man, with his locks wrapped around his body like a tunic. A little bush was peeking out of the top of his tight jeans, hinting at some serious lumber below. He looked a bit like Uncle. I laughed and turned to him. 

‘Uncle, you don’t feel like this looks like you a bit, ent?’ 

He squinted and leaned in. ‘Meh can’ see from so far. You feel I young like you? Let me fetch meh glasses.’ 

I gave him a moment to put on his spectacles, two telescopic lenses that made his cataract-covered eyes look like far-away planets, thriving worlds resting beneath their milky atmospheres. He looked at the album cover, and a grin swept across his face. In the back of his molars, a gold tooth, which I never noticed before, glittered. 

‘Yah feel so?’ he chided. 

‘Yeah! Well, I mean’—my eyes darted between Uncle’s swollen belly and the rippling abs of the man on the cover—‘obviously not really, but something about the cheek bones there.’ 

He sucked his teeth. ‘Well, my yout, let me tell you something. That look like me because it is me.’ 

I eyed him hard, looking for a crack in his demeanour that would expose a lie. His pudgy cheeks remained taut and resolute. ‘Uncle, that’s you? But wait man; you were a real star boy!’ 

‘You feel I was always so old and slow? Shucks man, give Uncle some credit. I was a wild unruly yout at one point in my life too, you know. Jus like you.’ He laughed, knowing I was anything but wild and unruly. 

It was difficult to imagine these rhythms ever coming from the man in front of me—the sound, the beat, the pulse—it all felt so alive. And Uncle, despite his youthful affect, was certainly closer to death than life. 

‘I was a star boy fi true, my yout. Dem use ta call mi “Brown Star.”’ He smiled a sad smile. 

Something rigid floated between us. I smelled a story waiting to be told. But you know how Caribbean people are when they get going. It could take hours, and I had other places to be. I began to get up and head for the door, bracing myself for the crushing blow of Uncle’s soft, sad eyes. Just a few unbearable moments of guilt, and then I’d be free. But as I reached the threshold of the doorway, I thought of my own parents, whose stories I wished I had spent more time listening to. Besides, I think I was the only friend Uncle really had. Buckling under the weight of my own brought-upsies, I  turned back. ‘So, what was it like in the glory days?’ 

The way his eyes lit up. I knew it would be a long afternoon. Reluctantly, I got an expired orange soda out of the vending machine and sat on the rustic metal lid of a trash can. For the next hour, I listened to him drone on about performing for pallid tourists at Montego Bay before getting his big break and touring across The Continent, hitting all the big spots—Abuja, Addis Adaba, Lagos. Then he took the show to the U.K., where he fell in love with a Guyanese woman, only to leave her when he realised how cold the winters are (and because the police had sent a warrant for him after he threw a bottle at some band called The Rolling Stones who came on stage two hours late). He went on about places and people from an epoch that just felt beyond my reach—something out of a history book or my parents’ mouths. At first, I made sure to put in an emphatic ‘mhmm’ or a ‘woah!’ every now and then, like a good nephew. But eventually, my feigned eagerness began to atrophy, and I could do nothing but make faint groans. Uncle was still going by the time I tapped the dregs of the can into the back of my throat. I had largely zoned out when a croak in his voice brought me back to the room. 

‘And then I come up here. The yout nowaday don’t know much about dem kinda long-time thing. Is just me here now in disyah store. My pickney doh even come check meh.’ His eyes greyed again. ‘The world now just so…so lost. We have all we could want, but we missing the real. The truth. Dem’ machine could nevah give you that. That feel, yah see me?’ 

I nodded, but really, I just wanted him to stop talking. I was too young to know how to sit with him there, in what would be his last day on earth, and soak in his truth. I did not yet realise that I found his stories and accomplishments so hard to listen to because I had none of my own. I did not yet know how to play a role in someone else’s grief. The pain and confusion of it all. Instead, all I could feel was my irritation at how much of the day I had wasted listening to him. He took off his glasses, and I saw he was shaping up to say something more. But I couldn’t take it. I stood up and walked out, but not before he slipped me a small piece of paper, which I quickly crumpled into my pocket. I only looked at it a few blocks later, when I knew I had lost sight of him. 

* 

The paper in my hand was a flyer. The design was shoddy at best, with an ungainly picture of Uncle superimposed over an endlessly, unnaturally blue sky with clouds parting over the ocean. You could still see the frame of his red leather chair at the edges of his body, where the editor had failed to crop it properly. At the top, yellow block letters read, ‘An evening with Brown Star—one last dance!’ It looked more like an obituary than a concert poster. The date listed beneath was for tonight. 

I stopped in my tracks. Uncle had played his own music in the store knowing I would hear it. Like my own father, he did not know how to submit himself to opening up voluntarily. He clearly wanted me to come. And I had walked out on him. A creeping sense of guilt and uneasiness started to bubble in my stomach. To make matters worse, the tune of Uncle’s sweet song followed me all the way home. I could only remember the first few words, which stuck in my head like raisins in a currant roll. 

Neighbour neighbour come and lend me some sugah

Don’t need much, just a pinch… 

I tried to search for the song on the global music database, but it was nowhere to be found. I even asked my A.I. bots to make music like ‘Brown Star’, and they came up with nothing. I scanned the Digisphere for the next hour, looking for some place where I could find a copy of his music. Eventually, I found a site that was dedicated to the restoration of old Caribbean songs called ‘Who Don’t Feel Must Hear’. With a few clicks, I was able to get 3D-printer schematics for a copy of Brown Star’s 1983 album, One More Dance, and an old cassette player, along with an instruction booklet. 

The device and the tape printed almost instantly. I held the foreign objects in my hand, turning them over and skimming through the leaflet. I was used to having music streamed directly into my ear canal, and these over-the-ear headphones made me feel claustrophobic. After some tinkering and trial and error, I loaded in the tape and pressed the little silver ‘play’ triangle on the cassette machine. 

The tape whirred to life, and I was teleported back to the orbit of Brown Star. All of his songs had that old time Caribbean flare: sexual innuendo, political critique, Black power slogans and the like. Some made me laugh; some brought me close to tears. I felt it. Whatever the ‘it’ was that Uncle was trying to tell me about at the store. I stashed the cassette back in my back pocket and headed out the door back to the laundromat. I owed Uncle an apology. But more than that, I needed to see, to feel it all, live and in action. 

* 

Dusk had settled in by then, and I could see the fluorescent interior of the laundromat from a block away. The store was empty (as it always was), but in front of it, there was a makeshift stage—a thin piece of plywood, about six feet wide, mounted a few inches off the ground on crumbling bricks. On stage were two artsy and youthful-looking musicians. On the drums was a dougla kid, maybe in his late 20s, with a sleek moustache, curled up at the ends. It gave him a mischievous look, like he might pull out a  stick of dynamite at any time. On bass was a young woman with blue-black skin. She wore a crop top with a little pot belly sticking out. Her shirt read Selassie’s Revenge, and her hair was bowl cut with purple highlights. She and Uncle had the  same cheekbones. There was an electric guitar in the middle of the stage, resting on Uncle’s signature leather chair. The body of the guitar was a deep oak brown that faded into a dazzling black as it moved up the neck, where a streak of silver pouted between the tuning pegs. Uncle stood slightly to the left of the chair. He hadn’t seen me yet. 

They had just wrapped up a sound check. The two young musicians hopped off the stage and walked off in different directions, perhaps to grab a bite before the show began. It was just Uncle and me there. He snapped his head in my direction, and, for a moment, we traipsed a tightrope of stiff air. But then he wilted into a smile. His gold tooth caught a kiss from the rising moonlight over my shoulder. I moved towards him, fumbling my words: ‘Uncle I…I found your songs and at home, and I realised…I just want to say that—’ 

Uncle waved me off. ‘No time for that right now my yout; come let me show you something.’ 

I was relieved. I hadn’t formulated exactly what I was going to say yet. I followed him into the store, where he stood still and inhaled with his back turned to me. In total silence, he began taking off his shoes. Then he unbuttoned his wrinkly satin shirt and threw it on the ground. Next, he unbuttoned his pleated church pants and removed those too. 

‘Woah, Uncle, what are you—’ 

He ignored me and continued to undress until he was standing in front of me totally naked. I tried hard not to let my eyes wander; it felt like holding back magnets. He began pacing up and down between the neat rows of machines, placing his hand delicately on each one as he passed, like a pope blessing a class of kindergarteners. His old buttocks looked like half-cooked pancakes. 

He paused in front of a machine at the very back of the store and placed both his palms on it, pressing downward. I heard the metallic warble of the metal bending. He craned his neck towards the sky and held this pose for several seconds. Had he finally gone senile? Or was this some sick punishment for me to witness? 

‘Uncle, if this is about today, I—’ 

Uncle cut me off. ‘My yout. I appreciate you comin fi check pon me this past likkle while.’ 

I foraged for words but found none. 

Uncle planted a laugh in the silence between us. ‘Is a strange ting. I spend mi whole life tryna to fight di changes in di world. Telling di yout what they didn’t know. What dem was missing in dey life. That dey were alive, but dem nah really living.’ 

Suddenly, with remarkable agility, he leapt into the air and swung himself into the washing machine, which swallowed him whole. I jumped back. Uncle stuck his tiny brown, bespectacled head out of the machine. He looked like a turtle in there, the giant metal shell housing his soft, wrinkly underbelly. He grinned at me. I was beginning to grow nervous. 

‘But then mi tink maybe di youth know something that Uncle too stubborn to learn. Maybe mi did need to feel and connect and listen and reason wit unu too. Maybe dis dutty stinkin technology nah so useless.’ 

‘Wait Uncle, what are you…listen, you were totally right; I learned so much and—’ 

He interrupted, speaking louder this time. ‘Mi grandbaby install dis e’re machine when the store first open. Di latest kinda ting. Top ah di line’ He stuck his hand out of the machine and gave its hide two firm pats. ‘But mi never want fi use it. Until today.’ 

‘Uncle I don’t know what’s going on, but I need you to listen; I—’ 

‘She say it does really get di wrinkles out. Let we take it for a spin, yes?’ 

Before I could start again, he laid his spectacles on top of the washing machine  and slammed the circular door shut behind him. 

I started screaming. First just curse words, then his name, then his first name, which had suddenly come back to me. I tried to pry open the washing machine door, but it was sealed shut. I turned around to find help, but the street was empty. Who could I call? I spun through a mental catalogue of neighbours and peers only to realise, with a fright, that Uncle was my only friend here. We had got rid of the police years ago, and  the local community assistance committee would have no better idea than I did how to operate these antiques. Was it going to blend him up into a smoothie? Shoot him out like a cannonball? All the machines at my home were voice activated, so I started yelling into every part of the contraption, begging it to stop. Nothing. I looked at the strange diagrams on the wall, but none of it made sense to me. I pushed random buttons, which sat beneath faded illustrations of half-empty cups (half-filled, my therapist would advise me to say). 

Meanwhile, the machine was humming maniacally. Inside, I heard Uncle’s potbelly body ricocheting around with a dull thwapping sound. I tried to peer inside, but the round window was obscured by layers of foam and sloshing fluids. At a few points, I swore I heard him singing in there. Finally, I calmed down enough to identify a knob that seemed to be the main control. It had been turned far beyond any of its usual settings, which read Sheets, Delicates, Quick Wash, Heavy Wash, to a setting that seemed  to have been drawn on by hand, scribbled over a sliver piece of duct tape in green marker. It read: Irie. I used all my force to try and turn the crank back the other way, but it was stuck. 

I had just taken a few steps back, ready to do a movie-style run and kick to smash in the glass, when the machine stopped. It emitted a sinful buzzing sound, and the door gently clicked open on its own, a reminder of my own uselessness. A cloud of green mist fizzed out of the metal husk. What I witnessed next could not have been the work of a new technology. I hadn’t heard of anything like it before, not even a rumour.  

Out stepped the most beautiful man I had ever seen. I recognised him immediately as the man on the Brown Star album cover although, this time, the jeans were not around to hide the thunder of his thighs. Uncle—if I could even call him that now—put his magnificent, mahogany hand on my shoulder. It felt like a moth landing. He looked at me once and then, without  saying a word, strode outside to the stage, where the two young musicians stood waiting. I don’t know how long they had been there, but they seemed completely unsurprised. I stood inside the store, my mouth agape, watching Uncle’s muscular  back fold and bend as he greeted the empty street. He rolled his neck left, then right. 

Stretched his arms out wide and folded them across his chest. Then, rubbing his hands  together, he gave me a wry smile from over his shoulder. He nodded his head, gesturing for me to step outside. I obliged. At this point I had resigned myself to just go along with  whatever madness I was witnessing. 

I squeezed around the makeshift stage to the front. I was still the only person there. Uncle stood, towering on the stage. He felt larger than life. His hands hovered around the microphone, a thin slice of air between his fingertips and the cold metal. He opened his mouth, and a bellowing bass note blew through the street. BAH-DOOM. The glass on the machines in the store shattered, and a few shelves dropped off the walls. Instinctively, my hands leapt up to cover my ears. A part of my heart broke as I saw the neatly tended plants crumpled in a heap on the ground inside the store. The  sound stopped. Uncle was clearing his throat. 

A few doors and windows around the block slid open, revealing the furrowed faces of neighbours. Some of them began approaching the stage, ready to cuss this naked madman. Uncle was unfazed. He was in the zone, his eyes closed, standing firm. 

‘Sorry there, bredrin; me a likkle bit rusty,’ he said to the gathering, bewildered crowd. 

He opened up his mouth again, and the rumbling began once more. He held the note this time, his raspy voice filling the air. It was even louder than the first one. I covered my ears and began yelling, but I could not hear myself. He held the note so long that windows all down the block shattered, car alarms chirped for a moment then grew quiet as the metal around them twisted into knots. A fire hydrant burst and wet the pant legs of the gathering crowd of protestors, who had been brought to their knees. I fell backwards, and the cassette in my back pocket burst and began bleeding black spools of tape. I strained my neck to look up at the stage. 

Uncle stood with his arms stretched wide. Gradually, gently even, he began ascending the scale, and the ear-shattering tone melted into something much more mellow and coherent. The band behind him blossomed into life. It was music. It was that good music. It was Brown Star. 

Neighbour neighbour come and lend me some sugah 

I turned around and was shocked to see that the smattering of disgruntled neighbours  had become a bubbling, bacchanalian congregation. Fold-out chairs were fished out of the deepest bowels of closets. Aunties and uncles sat and poured drinks, watching young lovers and friends sway, united at the hips. A swift-handed woman chopped the heads off coconuts with a machete and passed them around. A snow-cone man arrived. I never knew so many people lived here. 

The music wasn’t so much coming out of the band as into all of us. Every thud of the sticky kick drum tunnelled its way through me, filling me from head to toe. The crunchy snare on every third beat commanded me back to my feet, which were now moving, and the jabs of the guitar were restringing me from the inside out. Uncle’s voice loosened my limbs and turned my waistline into a hula-hoop. I caught my reflection in a puddle that had formed from the busted fire hydrant. My jaw dropped. I had never moved like this in my life. But I didn’t want it to stop. I wanted it to consume me whole. 

The band was now in full swing. The pavement bucked and slithered away, giving way to patches of grass and weed beneath. High rises shuddered and withered into dust. Palm trees awoke from the earth and stretched in the moonlight. The puddle from the leaky hydrant was now a sea full of tropical fish, spiralling beneath a crystal blue surface. 

Uncle’s whole body began to glow. His hair let off little sparks of all different colours, and a hearty green light silhouetted his whole frame. He began to drift up in the  air, floating a few inches off of the stage. He let go of the microphone, and it hovered in front of him on its own. 

The drummer played a solo that summoned a herd of goats. The bassist was walking through the crowd, mango trees sprouting in the wake of her footsteps. People began scaling the these to get a better view of Uncle, who was now floating at least twenty feet  in the air. The world had been peeled back into something primordial, an essence. 

I did not know at the time that it would be the last time I would see Uncle. That he  had given this finale of his life to us, leaving a little piece of him with all who gathered there. I don’t know if it would have changed anything. What I might have told him. How the night may have meant something different. I’m not sure if I would have wanted to know. For in my unknowingness, my limbs lost all constraint. My knees buckled in ways I never knew they could, and I turned away from myself. I embraced strangers and felt the laughter ripple through our chests. I surrendered to the gravity of black and brown stars constellating the night sky. Weaving his way between them, Uncle swam higher and higher. His locks were pointing straight up towards the heavens. His arms stretched wide, palms facing upwards, awaiting stigmata. His voice reaching an empyrean falsetto, he sang the song of his life. 

Neighbour neighbour come and lend me some sugah. 

Don’t need much, just a pinch 

I know it might raise mi pressha, 

But mi only have one life to live 

Neighbour neighbour, mi know you mi whole life, 

So don’t think I forget 

Your mango was always the ripest

And your sugar, the sweetest yet 

Neighbour neighbour, if you don’t have no sugah,

Take a trip over still, 

Stretch your legs and walk through me yard

And rest by mi window sill 

Neighbour neighbour, we both getting older,

So let me move about, 

Let we spin one more time as the grey taking over

Before our colour wash out

2024 Commonwealth Short Story Prize Shortlist: Issue 3