Aglet's Got the Melanomas

         "Momma," Aglet puffed and huffed as if he'd run a marathon. A marathon wherein his running-mates had all been enormous spiders, given the look of sheer terror on his face. "Momma!"
         "Yes, Aggy-bear?" his mother responded, as serene as Aglet was the opposite, her eyes flicking up from a large and dangerous-looking book to acknowledge her younger son.
Said son clambered on to the couch beside her and thrust his arm under her chin as urgently as if his hand had become a lit stick of dynamite and he needed to know what to do with it. His arm, it should be noted, was already a bit too flabby for a boy of six, but being a boy of six, he could still hide behind the assumption that he was just a bit later in losing his puppy fat. Everyone was different, after all, and anyway he would most likely shoot up six inches once puberty hit and everything would smooth right out like it was supposed to. His arm was flabby enough, though, that he could rotate the fleshy bit of his upper arm in order to show his mother the underside without too much effort. "I've got a mole," he said dreadfully, pointing out the puckered, darkish circle of melanin with a stumpy finger, the expectation being of course that his mother would immediately shriek or burst into tears or something and certainly whisk him up in her arms like a papoose and rush him to the hospital.
         "So you do," confirmed Carolyn rather disappointingly, with the sinking sort of I-thought-he-was-over-this sigh that every parent has during phases like this.
         "It's raised, see?" urged Aglet, for she had surely not grasped the full implications of this scenario. If she had, she would not still be sitting down, that's for certain.
         Aglet's mother sighed and rubbed her temples wearily. The boy had been on what his mother called his "Cancer Kick" ever since the concept had been brought up to him, about a month ago now, and since then he had been utterly inconsolable. You couldn't force him outdoors, God knows, and he wouldn't drink milk on his cereal any more for the growth hormones that were supposedly in it. Doesn't even know what the hell hormones are, thought Carolyn. She had not-so-secretly developed a loathing of the media and its constant harking on the subject for bringing her boy, snot-nosed and in tears, shaking her awake in the middle of the night now every time he got a headache or had trouble peeing or noticed a patch of dry skin.
         "Aggy-bear, it's just a mole," Carolyn said with as much gentleness as she could muster, though she would rather be screaming it-- It's just a mole, you stupid boy, for God's sake I went to the trouble of being in labor with you for four-loving-teen hours and all I've got to show for it is this irritating little runt here who can't give me the kindness of a few-loving-hours' peace! her subconscious screamed out at her, tearing out its hair and slamming its head against the inside of her skull. Envisioning this rather ridiculous scene-- her subconscious, instead of an abstract concept thought up by psychologists and neurologists and what-have-you throughout the years, as physically a miniature version of herself right down to the fluffy pink slippers on her feet-- she felt a migraine coming on. "You're a healthy boy, Aggy-bear, you've had your check-up for this year and the doctor even says you're fine. You're a big healthy boy and you need to stop worrying yourself about all this silliness. Go out back and see what your brother's doing, why don't you?"
But a whole different conflict of emotions gripped Aggy-bear right now, so much so that he could not allow himself to see the warning signs that flanked the darkening path of continuing this conversation, or even the smallest flicker of terror at the thought of being forced out to play with his brother. Most of these conflicts being over the fact that he was absolutely certain that, in some far reach of his body, Cancer was lurking. Cancer was getting in his bloodstream, making growths in whatever a prostate was, eating away at his bones like some unstoppable alien fungus.
There was just something too unworldly and horrifying about it, the way people in commercials or on the news spoke of it in grave tones. If his mind had not been the mind of a six year old-- though a six year old who was proud to say he was reading several grades ahead of where he was supposed to be the last time his class had been tested-- he might have drawn some sort of parallel between the way grown-ups talked about cancer and the way children were told about the Boogeyman. Cancer was what the Boogeyman upgraded to when you became a grown-up, evolving to fit new fears, a boogeyman that started from the inside and worked its way out-- a boogeyman that lurked in the corrupted cells of your own body instead of lurking in your closet or under the bed. What was worse, by the time you noticed it you were probably too late to do anything, said the people on TV solemnly. What was more, unlike the Boogeyman, there were no rituals through which you could go to ensure it didn't find you. Cancer could get you even if you did come home before dark. Cancer could get you even if you slept in the middle of the bed without any of your hands or feet dangling off the edge. It didn't matter to cancer how many plastic bird-shaped night-lights you kept plugged in, it could still get you. It didn't seem fair, in his six year old's mind, that something so casually evil to exist; even monsters had standards, or they were supposed to.
         "There was a boy on the News, they found a cancer on him and he was only four years old," Aglet said, taking a different approach.
         "And do you think a four year old spends all his time obsessively checking every patch of skin for dermatological irregularities?" Carolyn said patiently.
         "Well, he probably has a mom that gives a darn about her child's moles," Aglet replied desperately, and the passive aggression was hardly lost on his mother. She gave him a cool, yet dangerous look over the wire frames of her reading glasses. The miniature Carolyn of her subconscious was about to have its way, and Aglet was beginning to sense that, even through his overwhelming fear of becoming one of those happy smiling people whose pictures get flashed on some big news channel as a cautionary tale: 'Twas just a regular mole, his mother said, but he knew better-- so sad, what a loss, such potential cut so short, tsk tsk tsk, et cetera, and on to the weather.
         So it was that, moments later, he was sent out after his big brother; cancerous, festering mole and all, and at that point there was truly no justice to be had in the world.