Henry Hoover Can't Swim

Henry Hoover Can’t Swim


Creation had always come easy to him. He could sit down at his keyboard and have 300 words on an idea before he even knew what the idea was. Inspiration was always there, floating in the shallow end of his pool until the productivity wave hit and it was time to swim. The funniest thing had happened recently, though. Well, funny if you’re his nemesis and his suffering sustains you.

Somebody had put a vacuum in the pool. The second he stopped paying attention, it was all gone. Inspiration hit its head on the floor where water once was and died. He didn’t even realise this had happened until he sat down to churn out another classic piece of flash fiction and the smell of Inspiration’s rotting corpse had hit his nose. As you can imagine, this was an absolute nightmare for him. 

He was not unprepared, though. Fortunately, weeks prior to the dreaded draining of the pool, Inspiration had given the struggling writer power of attorney. He had back-tracked the do not resuscitate order Inspiration had signed (he also invested all of Inspiration’s money in a timeshare but that doesn’t really seem relevant). What a relief.

The panicked author began to write a piece about a man who wore a suit. The suit, however, was actually a mask. Metaphorically speaking, at least. He had meant for this thinly veiled metaphor to be just the literary tangent he needed to revive Inspiration’s bloated carcass so he could get his portfolio back on track. 300 words in and… nothing. The idea was going nowhere. Every other word he was writing just came across as painfully derivative and it stopped him dead in his tracks.

No. This wasn’t it. He could never give up on Inspiration this easily. Inspiration had been with him since he was just a boy. It had accompanied him through countless dull family road trips. It had pushed him through a myriad of aimless school days. Inspiration was there for him every single night as a teenager who couldn’t sleep, crafting endless compelling narratives to get him through the night when his mother had removed his phone from his room. No, he couldn’t give up. 

He sat up straight and began to type once more. Each clack of the keyboard served as a literary defibrillator, each noun giving everything it had to jolt inspiration back to life so it could take the reins and drive this story home. Surely a confusing piece about the duality of man and the sacred bond between two polar opposites would be exactly what inspiration needed to come back and make him seem like a competent artist. This would work. It had to work.

It did not work. 350 words down the drain. What good was a story consisting of pointless blathering about how some guy was really uncertain but he had a friend who was very certain going to do for him as a writer? Everyone has seen this trope a million times and it was so rarely good. Who was he to think he could do it justice when so many others had failed? No, this wouldn’t be it. This wouldn’t be the piece that brought him back from the edge of oblivion. All hope seemed to be lost. He abandoned writing after this disappointment.

For a few days, I mean. A writer can’t truly abandon writing no more than a physicist can abandon science. It’s all around them and it’s everything they have. It’s who they are at their core and it’s why they’re here in this world. To run away from your destiny is to eat soup with a fork. Eventually, you’re going to get to where you were always going. You’re only making it harder for yourself. 

He sat down and began to write one more time. A fruity little love story, what can go wrong? Delicately toeing around the general concept of being okay with who you really are and coming to terms with the fact you’re never going to be who everybody else wants you to be. That was exactly what he needed. Although, as it turns out, he couldn’t get further than 300 words without thinking whatever he was writing was nothing more than confusing drivel. He hadn’t abandoned writing, but it had abandoned him.

Then again, maybe it didn’t. Maybe he had just had a long week. Maybe he had a few bad ideas in a row that didn’t go anywhere because not all ideas do. Maybe Inspiration never died. Maybe inspiration never left, because no matter how much you anthropomorphise something, said something never actually comes to life. Maybe he is me. Maybe all I really needed was to let myself blast out eight-hundred-ish words of self-absorbed nonsense to get myself back into the groove of being the creative I was born to be.

Maybe we’ll never know the truth. Or maybe, just maybe- there never was a vacuum cleaner at the swimming pool.

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