THE DEATH OF WALTER MITTY
Word Count: 437
No one had the sense, I guess, to look through his things before they emptied out his desk and dumped it in a box and George, the General Manager brought it to her two weeks later and with his somber face and more I’m so sorrys left it on her kitchen table like a bomb.
She didn’t open it for several weeks. The kids were there and slowly drifted back to their own homes dotted in the distance, like pinpoints on a map. Then she was alone. She wandered through the house cleaning up just from the people they’d had in after the word spread of her husband’s sudden heart attack and then the children being here and overflowing bedrooms into sleeping bags and suitcases in the family room, the dining room at night. She vacuumed savagely. Dusted hard and even swept a lamp right off a table where it smashed onto the wooden floor and then she vacuumed all the teeny tiny pieces she didn’t get up with her fingers.
Then she pulled out the box still ticking and set it beside the coffee table in the living room. She sat down on the couch and folded back the flaps. She reached in. She pulled out a gray stapler, the pencil cup Annie the youngest made for him in school. She pulled out a bundle of pens and pencils rubber-banded together and set them free in the cup on the coffee table. She smiled and stopped the tears that welled up from the sight of chewed-on erasers. He never broke the habit.
She pulled out a thick red binder, leafed through it quickly, bored at policies and procedures for the Wendham Accounting Agency. She grabbed a handful’s worth of loose papers, memos mostly, a few jokes sent through the emails that he’d printed out. And then it blew up in her face.
She stared at it awhile because it caught her by surprise, it was so out of place in the world of their home and even in his office-world away from her. Breasts and penises hung and poked and pinched and sucked in living color. Porno she could not imagine him ever having. It had to be a bad bad joke. Someone snuck it in there and George the General Manager didn’t know. Or maybe it was George. Anger rose within her for the first time since her husband died. And then she saw her pencil-doodled name underneath an image of a three-way on page 38. She left the magazine open on the table, leaned back and closed her eyes.
