From a ninth grade English class assignment. It will make more sense if you're familiar with the original short story by James Thurber, to which this is an additional episode.

Walter Mitty - The Sixth Daydream

Walter Mitty glanced at his watch and sighed. Women are all the same, he thought. Give them a minute and they'll take an hour. Or two, or even three, in this case. He'd already been through five daydreams, uninterrupted. It must have been a record.

Suddenly he noticed two men walking past, mostly because one of them was being very loud. He was gesturing wildly as he shouted at his counterpart, who was nodding vigorously in agreement.

"It's poppycock, that's what it is," the man shouted indignantly. "And even if they can do it, which they can't, mark my words, man wasn't meant to leave his good green Earth! The very thought is blasphemous!"

"Well, we certainly can't let the Germans do it first, sir," the other pointed out, "or they'll be roughing up London from space and we'll have nothing for it."

Veteran astronaut Walter Mitty walked calmly onto the bridge. It was a glorious sight, a wonderful monument to modern human technology. Complicated banks of buttons, switches and dials were manned by highly trained and specialized technicians who had graduated at the top of their classes on Earth. The computers clicked and whirred through the their calculations: ta-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa.

The captain's visage, however, revealed that something was terribly wrong.

He spoke in furtive whispers, so as not to alarm anyone else on the ship. "It's the engines, sir," he explained. "They're heating up too much and they're going to ignite the whole fuel storage. Even if she makes it through, she'll depressurize and kill everyone left."

"We haven't got much time then," said Walter Mitty. "I'm going out."

The captain was flabbergasted. "Sir, all I wanted was a diagnosis," he exclaimed hastily. "We have robots for the actual repairs."

"I'm not trusting my life to machines," Mitty insisted. "I'm going out."

Within a few minutes, he was in his spacesuit and attached to the ship by nothing more than a long, thin, snaking cord. He made his way back to the engines using the handholds along the ship's exterior and took out his trusty pressurized toolbox. He had to do this very fast or there would be several extra names in the obituaries the next day.

Suddenly, the engines flickered, the ship bucked like a wild bronco, and his safety cord snapped. As Walter Mitty lamented the poor quality of Chinese products, he desperately tried to swim through space back to the ship, but his lack of friction kept him in place. Realizing his mistake, he reached to switch on his jetpack, but it merely sparked and fizzed. It was Chinese as well.

Then the ship exploded into billions of tiny flaming pieces.

Walter Mitty couldn't believe it.

They were all dead.

He was stuck in space, all alone.

"Someone must have dropped a cigarette in the aftershave section."

Walter Mitty came out of his daydream and realized that it had been all too realistic. The drugstore was gone. Everyone in it was gone. His wife was gone.

He remembered all the times she had nagged him. He remembered all the times she had awoken him from the wonderful fantasies in his daydreams to the pain and cruelty of his excruciatingly boring reality. He remembered all the times she had criticized him for having his head in the proverbial clouds. He realized how much he would miss her.

As he drove home, Walter Mitty didn't daydream about a thing.


​Main Page: Short Stories by C. Randall Nicholson