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Nocturnal Red

by Marcelo Medone

The night was quiet, with all the inmates sleeping peacefully. The young woman adjusted her cap in front of the mirror and smiled a perfectly professional smile. She walked silently into the room in her white rubber shoes and deftly advanced in the semi-darkness, illuminated by the moonlight streaming through the barred windows. She went from bed to bed, from sleeper to sleeper, whispering prayers of absolution and plunging a shining steel scalpel into the throbbing arteries of their exposed necks. Blood spread through the floor in scarlet rivulets and trickled down the sewers. The new nursing assistant loved the color red.

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Marcelo Medone (1961, Buenos Aires, Argentina) is a fiction writer, poet and screenwriter. His works have received awards and have been published in magazines and books, both in digital and paper format, individually or in anthologies, in multiple languages in more than 30 countries all over the world, including the US.