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Celebrants<br />
Stewart Massad<br />
Obstetrics and Gynecology 1st place, prose<br />
In the last <strong>of</strong> the day on the Friday before Christmas, rags <strong>of</strong> cloud scud <strong>of</strong>f<br />
the prairie, soar over the lake. As they change from lemon to rose, orange to violet, so<br />
do the cracked terracotta, sand-yellow brick, and old wavy glass <strong>of</strong> the hospital facade.<br />
Among the pigeons in Pasteur Park, a man in a quilted coat flings bread<br />
crumbs at the wind. He tears open his empty sack and shakes it at the sky, body<br />
uncoiling as he steps toward the hospital doors. Pigeons spring up before him, a billow<br />
<strong>of</strong> wings. Then darkness and the halogen lights come on.<br />
Hanging holly violates the fire code, so inside halls and <strong>of</strong>fice walls are decked<br />
with tinsel, cutout Santas, plastic stockings. Poinsettias sprout from file cabinets. On<br />
desks and charting tables, open eggnog cartons, empty soda jugs, and shopping bags<br />
from Fields sit by paper plates strewn with bits <strong>of</strong> icing, crumbs <strong>of</strong> cakes and cookies,<br />
cornbread, pilaf, tamales. Saint Nick is a big woman on the trauma unit in a red felt<br />
hat with acrylic fur and a brass bell over one ear who’s dishing out Demerol to gangbangers<br />
who know she brings better joy than any big-bellied reindeer jockey ever could.<br />
Outside the day’s last operation, an anesthetist in wrinkled pink sits on a steel<br />
stool, singing carols to an empty hall in gospel-trained tones. Downstairs on the wards,<br />
the singers are awkward adolescents, girls <strong>of</strong> every race. In plaid parochial school uniforms,<br />
they sing to gaunt men dying from alcohol and cigarettes, cancer and AIDS<br />
about kings and drummer boys, silent nights, and dreams <strong>of</strong> a Christmas just like the<br />
ones they used to know. They dance away down high-ceilinged halls and stairwells<br />
incensed with burnt marijuana: God rest you merry gentlemen.<br />
Brown leaves blow down the main hallway every time somebody ducks out for<br />
a smoke. A crowd jams the lobby, and the pharmacy line rounds the corner and doubles<br />
back. The dead leaves skitter past unshaven, unwashed panhandlers asleep on<br />
benches outside the MRI scanner. One opens an eye on a passing Azteca in jeans tight<br />
as a tomato skin, in lipstick dark as a cracked scab. An old Filipina sits next to him, settles<br />
against the plastic grocery bag that is both purse and pillow to wait with him for<br />
morning.<br />
A medical resident throws open steel fire doors and trots toward the emergency<br />
room, his shined black shoes and sober white coat drab beneath an electric blue<br />
turban and Sikh warrior’s beard. Squat women with the round faces <strong>of</strong> Mayan figurines<br />
herd flocks <strong>of</strong> children out <strong>of</strong> his way. The open coat that flaps behind him<br />
brushes a viejo with skin tanned by cigarettes and the Mexican sun who moves as fast as<br />
arthritis and emphysema allow, almost keeping up with the young inmate in a tan jail<br />
uniform and leg irons that clank like jingle bells all gone to rust.<br />
Elegant as night in silver, navy, and black leather, two cops chat up a chunky<br />
blonde in stirrup pants and earrings hung with chips <strong>of</strong> colored glass that jingle when<br />
she laughs at them. Three kids in baggy pants, hightops, bits <strong>of</strong> beard as big as they<br />
30 SCOPE <strong>2006</strong><br />
can grow, and parkas bulky as grown men’s muscles run up and down the stairs from the<br />
ward where their homeboy lies recovering from three bullets in the belly. They whoop<br />
and shout as they vault the steps, rounding square iron banisters cast with black florets:<br />
they might be mistaken for children, but for eyes careless and black as gun muzzles.<br />
And when they jog laughing down a hallway past the men in wheelchairs who wear<br />
green cotton gowns open to show <strong>of</strong>f chest hair and bandaged gunshot, they pause no<br />
more than does the commissioner in the gray double-breasted who’s through big glass<br />
doors for the taxi that will carry him away.<br />
In the bad light just behind him, a dark man hides a white cardboard box<br />
inside his long green coat. He sidles up to men and women waiting for the Harrison<br />
Street bus like a dope peddler, one eye out for cops who have no time for him. He<br />
works the queues, the crowds, the solitary idlers, red light from a passing ambulance<br />
spilling over all. Like a hoarse beer seller at a Sox game he cries his wares in a whisper:<br />
“Sugar cookies? Sugar cookies? I got sugar cookies here. Come on, people: it’s<br />
Christmas!”<br />
SCOPE <strong>2006</strong> 31