A calaverita for Doctor Ruelas

Since October 15 there has been a shoebox at the nurses' station, wrapped in purple tissue paper, with a sign in marker: "CALAVERITAS 2026. NO COMPLAINTS ACCEPTED". It's the same box every year. Not the same tissue paper, because that tears, but the same sign; someone just crosses out the year and writes the new one underneath. There are five years crossed out by now.

Calaveritas are the little rhyming poems we write around the Day of the Dead, where Death comes to collect someone you know and the joke is on them. The rule at the hospital is simple. Everyone on the night shift puts their name on a slip of paper, draws one, and writes a calaverita for whoever they got. They're read out loud in the early hours of the 30th, during the dead stretch, and the only condition is that nobody gets offended. The condition gets broken every year, but just a little.

I drew my slip with my eyes closed, like a church raffle. I opened it. It said "Dr. Ruelas." In Pao's handwriting, since she made the slips, and she swore she hadn't rigged it with a smile that said otherwise.

Rhyming with Ruelas

Doctor Ruelas is the orthopedist, the one who examined my knee in the hallway and put me on the bench for two weeks. He's serious, he looks at people over the top of his glasses, and I've never been able to tell whether he laughs at my jokes or just breathes hard. Writing him a calaverita was like tickling a dog you don't know: doable, but carefully.

The first thing I did was look for words that rhyme with Ruelas. In Spanish you get molars, shoe soles, schools, grandmothers, clay pots. You can't build anything out of that that doesn't sound like a dentist's ad. I wrote it on the grocery list, under "soap" and "earplugs", and left it there for a few days to see if it would ripen on its own.

It didn't. What I did have was afternoons. The free afternoons my knee gave me, almost two weeks of them now, and this time I spent them at the kitchen table with a pen, one of those notebooks they hand out at conferences, and Doña Chela's note watching me from the fridge. I hadn't written verses in years. The last time was in middle school, about a girl named Fabiola who got on my nerves for three straight years. I rhymed Fabiola with "all alone" in Spanish and got sent to the principal's office.

I asked the sisters' group chat for help. Andrea answered that her youngest also had to write a calaverita for school, about his teacher, and that since I was at it anyway I could write his too. Lucía sent a one-minute voice note full of suggestions, all of them built around a word that doesn't exist. My mom, from her new phone, sent a sticker of a dancing skull and the line "Say he's very handsome, doctors like that." I used none of it.

The reading

Last night at a quarter past four, Pao switched off the big light at the station and left just the desk lamp on, to make it spookier. About twelve people gathered: nurses, two residents, an orderly, Don Memo all the way from the entrance with his green thermos. Doctor Ruelas was on call and showed up last, hands in the pockets of his white coat, at the edge of the group, like someone just passing by.

The others went first. Pao got one about her habit of asking for shift swaps, where Death took her away "because she already owed three shifts." Mine was written by Don Memo, who isn't on the shift but always sneaks into the draw, and it was about the morning the Chevy said no: the Grim Reaper came for me in the parking lot and I asked her for jumper cables. I laughed so hard I had to sit down.

Then it was my turn. I read standing up, the paper trembling a little, looking at everyone except him. In English it loses the rhyme in places, but this is roughly how it went:

Death came into the ER / dressed up in her finest gown, / looking for Doctor Ruelas / in the hallways, up and down.

She found him in a corridor, / no office and no chair, / checking some man's wrist and knee / with no paperwork to spare.

"I've come for you, Doctor," / she said, calm as calm can be. / "Not now," Ruelas told her, / "ice and rest that knee."

Two weeks he kept her on the bench, / and she did as she was told, / so now Death walks with a limp / and can't get him in her hold.

There was a one-second silence, which at the nurses' station is a long time. Then Don Memo clapped with his thermos still in his hand and everyone laughed, and in the middle of it all I heard a laugh I didn't recognize, short, almost a cough. It was him.

What you take with you

At a quarter past seven, during handover, Doctor Ruelas walked past me on his way to the elevator. He asked for the paper. I gave it to him. He folded it in four, put it in the pocket of his coat next to a penlight and a pack of gum, and looked at me over his glasses.

"You can run tomorrow, Ortega. Slowly."

I said yes. Slowly, like Death. He didn't answer, but he walked off breathing hard, and now I know what that means.