The waiting room of the clinic was one of the nicer ones I’d been in. The yellow lights hung from the walls, making them look warm. The floral pattern of the thin carpet twisted and bent in swirls of hazy flowers that made me dizzy to look at, but it beat the usual linoleum. The stacks of magazines on the glass coffee table were relatively recent, and there was no music. I never liked waiting room music. All muted saxophones and no words, like you were waiting in a Nordstrom’s elevator. It still smelled like a waiting room though, like a combination of latex gloves and generic lilac air freshener. I pulled my rag out of my jacket pocket to catch a hacking cough, rolled up the rag and poked my nose back into my Grisham novel.
“You cough a lot.”
I lowered my book to see the boy. He was peering over the back of the chair in front of me, exposing only 10 grubby fingers, two brown eyes and a hundred flames of wild, orange hair.
“Are you sick?” he continued.
I said, “Yeah,” and coughed again into my rag.
“Ew,” the boy responded. “What do you got?”
“Cancer.”
The kid swung his legs back over the front of his chair and ran around to the back wall where I sat. Underneath the legs of the chairs I saw the sides of his Velcro sneakers light up his steps with flashes of red. He flashed across the nauseating carpet and pulled himself up onto the adjacent seat.  Without hesitating, he leaned his face close to mine. A smattering of freckles peppered the bridge of his nose and the apples of his cheeks, like tiny stars across a tan sky. He scrunched up his eyes and nose like he was examining me, bunching together the constellations of his freckles.
“Yep, you definitely got cancer,” he diagnosed. “Is that your cancer rag?”
“Yep.”
“Oh.”
“Are you sick, kid?”
“Nah,” he shook his head, “I’m just waiting on my mom to get off work.”
“Your mom’s a doctor?”
“No, a receptionist.”
“I see.”
“Do you live in the hospital?”
“No, I just visit a lot.”
The boy rubbed his nose with the palm of his hand. “My grandpa had cancer, and he lived in the hospital. And he gave me lots of quarters to buy stuff from the venting machines.”
I smiled, “From the vending machines?”
“Yeah, it had lots of stuff.”
I folded down the corner of the page of my book and set it in my lap. I turned to the boy, who was still looking at me like he was asking a question.
“Sorry, I don’t have any quarters,” I said.
Disappointed, the boy slumped against the back of the chair, stared at his feet and said, “Shoot.” I started laughing. Each inhale and exhale felt like God was striking matches against the sides of my lungs, but still I laughed. My wheezy chuckling transformed into another coughing fit, which I caught with the inside of my sleeve’s elbow.  I turned back to see the boy holding out my rag to me.
“Thanks, kid,” I rasped, taking it and wiping the slime out from my elbow.
“Are you gonna die in a hospital bed?” he asked.
“In a what?”
“In a hospital bed? My grandpa died in a hospital bed, is that where you’ll die too?”
“Yep.”
“Are you gonna have to wear those hospital gowns?”
“Most likely.”
The boy leaned back and sighed, “Man, I’m glad I’m not you.”
“Why?”
“I wouldn’t wanna wear those hospital gowns. If you get up, the whole wide world can see your butt.”
Then he laughed a giggly child’s laugh that showed off the gaps in his smile. His baby teeth looked like tiny white pebbles all spaced apart in his mouth. The sides of his chapped lips curled up, pushing the tops of his cheeks around his eyes. He smiled and I smiled and for a moment life was oh so very ordinary.
A brunette woman stuck her head out of the sliding window at the front desk, scanning the room for a second before spotting her son in the chair next to mine. “You ready to go, sweetie?” she called.
“Yes’m,” he answered, and began climbing down from the chair. He bent down to re-Velcro his sneakers before straightening back up to examine me one last time. “See if you can’t get some hospital pants or something,” he added before running to his mother at the front door, the little red lights on his feet blinking all the way.
 And for a moment, death was alright. It was so incredibly usual and mundane, nothing more than a pest throwing temper tantrums inside my lungs. It was something so trivial it couldn’t even impress some red-headed kid with dirty fingernails. I will probably die in a hospital bed, but there were more remarkable things. Death will always come second to bare butts in hospital gowns.