by Jesse Raub
Shuffled #5

There’s a ghost that lives in the coffee shop I work at.  His name is Reynolds, and he’s kind of an asshole.  He waits until I close down, then comes floating out through the walls and hovers over my shoulder and starts complaining again.

“You don’t know what it’s like being stuck in a coffee shop for eternity!” he whines.

I’d like to think I do.

The coffee shop I work at is small and in the basement of this old mansion along the main street of a small college town.  The walls and floors and shelves are all covered in knick-knacks and tacky paint jobs, but the kitsch level is worshiped as the zeitgeist of cultural rebellion by all these aging hippies who now work for the University and sit around drinking coffee in tiny mugs all day and night.  I close a few nights a week, a way to supplement the money I make as a secretary during the day, or the money I don’t make writing for different magazines and editing at night.

“This music is such a racket!” he moans, floating just above my left shoulder as I sweep the floor.  “Can’t we find something both of us can agree upon?”

The music in question is usually Led Zeppelin.

“I just don’t get it!” he bellows.  “Squeeze me like a lemon ’til the juice runs down your leg?  Custard Pie?  Is that a direct metaphor?  That’s disgusting!”

Every night, same shit.  I think I keep coming back to the Led Zeppelin just to try and drive him away.  It never works though.  He died choking on a muffin in 1913 as a guest of the mansion.  He’s not going anywhere.

“Can your bring back some occult books and try to break this curse?” he asks at the end of the night, when my co-worker is counting the drawer in the office.  Every night I just ignore him, and he goes floating back through the walls of the building, dejected.

“Did you hear something?” my co-worker always asks as he or she comes out of the office and shuts the door behind him or her.  “Sounded like an old Snaglepuss cartoon run through a TV full of static.”

“Nope,” I say, draining the mop bucket for the last time of the night.  “No Snaglepuss here.”

Just Reynolds.  That asshole.  Same time again tomorrow, Reynolds. This time we’re listening to “Misty Mountain Hop.”

“Misty Mountain Hop” by Jesse Raub is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

“Misty Mountain Hop” is a short fiction interpretation of the Led Zeppelin song of the same name from the album Led Zeppelin IV, released through Atlantic Records in the year 1971. It is the fifth story written as part of the Shuffled series, in which inspiration is chosen by random computerized algorithms on a well stocked iPod.