The Empty Stools

A clinical chemistry laboratory in a New York hospital on a bright spring morning, along a bench a row of chocolate-brown instrument boxes joined by tubing, first a brown cube with a silver turntable holding a ring of small cups of pale straw-yellow serum and a curved metal arm dipping into one cup, then a pump with clear plastic tubes carrying liquid segments parted by tiny air bubbles, a glass coil in a water bath, at the end a recorder feeding out a plain pale paper strip with a single wandering red line, a hand tearing off the strip, behind a row of empty laboratory stools, sunlight across the floor.