“A Day's Wait” is a short story by Ernest Hemingway. In the story, a young boy misunderstands the consequences of his fever, thinking that a fever of a hundred and two means that he will die. At first, neither the boy's father nor the reader understands what the boy is thinking. Only after the boy says, “How long will it be before I die?” do we and the father realize what the boy has been struggling with.

Once we have this knowledge, our perception of the boy changes. At first we thought he was merely a little strange, perhaps because of his fever, when he tells the father that he needn't stay in the room with him if it bothers him (the boy means the father can leave him alone if he doesn't want to watch him dying). Then he tells the father not to come in so that he won't catch what he has (the boy is trying to protect his father, thinking he might make him ill with his germs).

These actions on the part of the young boy reveal a poignant concern for his father in the face of his own impending death (or at least what he believes to be his impending death). Hemingway, however, has one more point to make. At the end of the story, after the boy has returned to normal, Hemingway makes an observation about the perplexing nature of human life: The next day "he cried very easily at little things that were of no importance."

We would expect the boy to be so relieved at the idea that we wasn't dying that little disappointments wouldn't cause him any distress. But human beings, unfortunately, don't behave that way in the real world.