Jo Gatford's "Hallelujah Has Too Many Verses for Karaoke"
- stanchionzine
- 3 days ago
- 2 min read
Hallelujah Has Too Many Verses for Karaoke
by Jo Gatford
The street evangelist is plugged into a three-foot-tall karaoke speaker on a little wheelie trolley and your first thought is how the hell he got it on the bus—or if he drove here, where the hell he managed to park because you’ve been driving squares around the second-most expensive zone for twenty minutes trying to find a spot which means you had to powerwalk for another fifteen and now you're late for an early bar shift with Cath who's going to get second-hand furious about the emcee preacher guy, even though you figure a person’s got to have some kind of transcendent damage to pitch up like that; to rubberneck stare every passer-by in the averted eye; to squat down and stage-whisper at little kids about how grateful we ought to be for that unconditional-but-evidently-pretty-fucking-conditional cloud-based absolution none of us deserve; to turn his shiny polyester suit into a sweat lodge and spit heartfelt threats into a cheap mic so distorted no one can really hear what he's saying anyway, but maybe there’s something in it because you’re the only one listening, standing there on the traffic island with the crossing sign bleeping, wondering if there’s anything you care about enough to scream at tourists; wishing you had the balls to tackle him to the ground, to snatch up the microphone and then, well, who knows what you'd do—start singing maybe, even though you've never had a solid karaoke song, even after a biblical amount of years working in sticky, windowless places like Cath’s, even if it could be the only three-to-five minutes anyone might actually listen to you—and then at least you'd have a story to distract her with instead of having to listen to her bitch-lyrical about the sociological construction of a vengeful god for the next eight hours when all you really want to say is that honestly you’d take the fear of an invisible sky-daddy over the quadrupling of your student debt and the sub-basement levels of disappointment you keep discovering with almost every conversation you have these days and the kidney-shiv realisation that there’s more time behind than ahead and how the hell are you supposed to breathe normally when you wake up with all that sitting on your chest? and maybe that's what you’ll ask the budget resort prophet when you finally cross against the lights, humming hallelujah as you pass him on your way inside; close enough to see the apoplectic foam at the edges of his lips but not close enough to pry his colourless fingers from the mic; late enough Cath’ll dock a whole hour off your wages but not late enough that it's not worth going in at all.
Jo Gatford is a novelist, award-winning short fiction writer, and the author of the first book Stanchion published, in January 2023, The Woman’s Part. It remains the best-selling book in Stanchion history.
Her work has been published in PRISM, The Forge, trampset, Pithead Chapel, SmokeLong Quarterly and elsewhere. She occasionally posts about weird 17th century mermaid tiles on BlueSky at @jmgatford. She feels very strongly about puns and, obviously, Shakespeare.
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