The Paper Strip

A hospital delivery room in England at night, a fetal monitor on its trolley one metre twenty tall, a desk-shaped housing with a taupe-brown metal lid and a cream-white front of modules with small knobs and push buttons, their small windows dark, at its right a recorder from which a plain pale pink paper strip with a single drawn wavy line spills in folds to the floor, below a brown drawer with grey cables, two round blue sensor discs on a fabric belt at the foot of a freshly made delivery bed, its white sheet smooth and tight, a midwife's hand in a pale blue sleeve tearing off the strip, dim lamplight.