excerpt from Beholding Something Fine

We lingered in the corner of a delivery room while the obstetrics staff attended to a laboring woman. Tall and slender, the soon-to-be-mother was writhing and moaning, clenching and stretching, with the otherworldly work of it all. She transformed, suddenly, moving from supine arching to standing straight up in the stirrups, like an angry Greek goddess, bellowing her pain.

She was not our patient, though.

We were waiting for the baby.