A Day's Wait

"A Day's Wait" is a short story by Ernest Hemingway published in his 1933 short story collection The Snows of Kilimanjaro about a nine-year old boy who is sick.

The story focuses on the boy and his father who calls him Schatz (German, meaning darling). When the boy gets the flu, his temperature rises to 102 degrees Fahrenheit. He is very quiet and depressed, finally asking when he will die; he had thought that a 102 degree temperature was lethal because he heard in France (where Celsius is used) that one cannot live with a temperature over 44 degrees. When the father explains to him the difference in scales, the boy slowly relaxes, and the next day, "he cried very easily at little things that were of no importance."

The story mainly signifies the boy's misunderstanding leading to many changes in his own mind.

Works of Ernest Hemingway
Novels
  • The Torrents of Spring (1926)
  • The Sun Also Rises (1926)
  • A Farewell to Arms (1929)
  • To Have and Have Not (1937)
  • For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940)
  • Across the River and into the Trees (1950)
  • The Old Man and the Sea (1952)
  • Islands in the Stream (1970)
  • The Garden of Eden (1986)
  • True at First Light (1999 memoir)
Short stories
  • "Big Two-Hearted River" (1925)
  • "Indian Camp" (1925)
  • "The Doctor and the Doctor's Wife" (1925)
  • "The Battler" (1925)
  • "A Very Short Story" (1925)
  • "Soldier's Home" (1925)
  • "Cat in the Rain" (1925)
  • "The End of Something" (1925)
  • "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place" (1926)
  • "A Canary for One" (1926)
  • "Fifty Grand" (1927)
  • "Hills Like White Elephants" (1927)
  • "The Killers" (1927)
  • "The Undefeated" (1927)
  • "Che Ti Dice La Patria?" (1927)
  • "In Another Country" (1927)
  • "Fathers and Sons" (1932)
  • "A Day's Wait" (1933)
  • "The Gambler, the Nun, and the Radio" (1933)
  • "A Way You'll Never Be" (1933)
  • "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" (1936)
  • "The Capital of the World" (1936)
  • "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" (1936)
Short story
collections
  • Three Stories and Ten Poems (1923)
  • In Our Time (1925)
  • Men Without Women (1927)
  • Winner Take Nothing (1933)
  • The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories (1938)
  • The Essential Hemingway (1947)
  • The Hemingway Reader (1953)
  • The Snows of Kilimanjaro (1961)
  • The Fifth Column and Four Stories of the Spanish Civil War (1969)
  • The Nick Adams Stories (1972)
  • The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway (1987)
  • Ernest Hemingway: The Collected Stories (1995)
Plays
  • The Fifth Column (play) (1938)
Poetry
  • 88 Poems (1979)
Non-fiction
  • Death in the Afternoon (1932)
  • Green Hills of Africa (1935)
  • Hemingway, The Wild Years (1962)
  • A Moveable Feast (1964)
Posthumous
  • A Moveable Feast (1964)
  • By-Line: Ernest Hemingway (1967)
  • The Fifth Column and Four Stories of the Spanish Civil War (1969)
  • Islands in the Stream (1970)
  • Ernest Hemingway: Cub Reporter (1970)
  • The Nick Adams Stories (1972)
  • Ernest Hemingway Selected Letters 1917–1961 (1981)
  • The Dangerous Summer (1985)
  • Dateline: Toronto (1985)
  • The Garden of Eden (1986)
  • The Complete Short Stories Of Ernest Hemingway (1987)
  • The Complete Poems
  • True at First Light (1999)
  • Under Kilimanjaro (2005)
  • On Paris (On) (2008)
  • The Cambridge Edition of the Letters of Ernest Hemingway (2011)
Film adaptations
  • A Farewell to Arms (1932)
  • For Whom the Bell Tolls (1943)
  • To Have and Have Not (1944)
  • The Killers (1946)
  • The Macomber Affair (1947)
  • The Breaking Point (1950)
  • The Snows of Kilimanjaro (1952)
  • The Killers (1956)
  • The Sun Also Rises (1957)
  • A Farewell to Arms (1957)
  • The Old Man and the Sea (1958)
  • Hemingway's Adventures of a Young Man (1962)
  • The Killers (1964)
  • For Whom the Bell Tolls (1965)
  • Islands in the Stream (1977)
  • The Sun Also Rises (1984)
  • In Love and War (1996)
  • The Old Man and the Sea (1999)
Related
  • Hemingway & Gellhorn (2012)

Famous quotes containing the words day and/or wait:

    One day I wrote her name upon the strand;
    But came the waves, and washed it away:
    Again, I wrote it with a second hand;
    But came the tide, and made my pains his prey.
    Edmund Spenser (1552?–1599)

    Under a Presidential government, a nation has, except at the electing moment, no influence; it has not the ballot-box before it; its virtue is gone, and it must wait till its instant of despotism again returns.
    Walter Bagehot (1826–1877)