Harvey Frick was an accountant. He had not always wanted to be an accountant; he didn't even want to be one now. What he had wanted was to be a writer, but that was a long, long time ago. His parents' voices still echoed in his head from many years ago...
"If you want to further your education, and if you expect us to help you pay for it, you're going to have a pick a major that will pay the bills," his father had sternly told him.
"Yes, hone, and I just don't see Creative Writing as something that would help you do that. Why not go Pre-Med?" his mother suggested.
That was how Harvey had become an accountant. Now he was forty-three years old, and he felt he had accomplished nothing he set out for himself to do all those many years ago, when he was a young man of eighteen and the world had been wide open to the possibilities.
Sure, he appeared to be the perfect employee, but Harvey, in fact was not. He never called in sick or came in late. He even came in to work for others who called off. He showed up to work every day, Monday through Saturday, at eigh o'clock on the dot and always stayed at least an hour later than closing time at five to finish up paperwork or anything else he might want to work on. And though he had earned the right to two weeks' paid vacation every year since his third consecutive year ov employment and the Richardson Accounting Agency, having no wife or living family to spend it with and very few friends, he never felt the need to take advantage of it. He was the perfect employee on the outside, but on the inside, he didn't even want to be there. And isn't that really the key to any successful career? That the very essence of being a good employee was rooted in the depth of one's core, programmed into their DNA or something, is love for their job, love for what they do? In Harvey's opinion, it was.
Then, one day, a not so extraordinary day, Harvey did something completely out of the ordinary. He called his boss and told him he would not be in for three months and to hire a temp in his place until then. He was taking his vacation.
I've lived my whole life without really living it," Harvey told himself, in a brilliant moment of revelation. He wanted to be the man he was when he was seventeen. A man who still knew how to dream, who saw things with many pairs of eyes and from many different perspectives, not just his own, someone who didn't go through the motions everyday, but lived in the moment; and then it came to him. He was going to write a book.
This came from a prompt to write a short inspired by a cartoon drawing of a man sitting at a desk with sheets of paper everywhere and chewing on his pencil. He just looked sort of hopeless and desperate and determined all at the same time. Amazing what you can get from one picture.