Keisha
When Keisha Ceylon saw the pink sash drop past her eyes, she reached up instinctively to get her fingers between it and her neck. But she wasn’t quick enough. Wendell Garfield wrapped it tightly around her throat and began to twist.
“I swear, I don’t know how you know, but you’re not going to tell anyone,” he said.
Keisha clawed at the sash, her fingernails ripping into her own skin as she tried to loosen his hold on her. But the satiny ribbon was already cutting deep into her neck.
Garfield was leaning down over her, his mouth close to her right ear. His breath was hot against her cheek.
She tried to say something, to scream, but with her windpipe squeezed, nothing came out. Not a sound. She felt her eyes bulging. She kicked at the floor, dug into the carpet with her heels.
Keisha Ceylon knew that she was going to die. She didn’t need any vision for that glimpse into the future.
Any second now, she thought, it’s going to be over. Maybe I had it coming. Ripping people off, taking advantage of them when they were at their most vulnerable. I’m getting what I deserve.
Didn’t make her feel any better about it, though.
She gave up clawing at her throat and dropped her hands to her sides.
“You must have been there,” Garfield said through gritted teeth. “You had to be watching. That’s the only way I can figure it. You were up there, you saw me put the car on the ice, you saw it go under, and then you figured you could blackmail me. A thousand today, another thousand next week, and then the week after that, until I had nothing left.”
He had the ends of the sash twisted several times around his palms and kept pulling. Keisha could feel herself starting to lose consciousness. She wondered what he would do with her body. Hoped he wouldn’t put her in the lake along with Mrs. Garfield.
She didn’t like the water.
In the seconds just before she figured she was going to black out, her fingers dug into the seat of her chair.
Her right hand brushed up against something.
Something soft, almost furry.
Yarn.
And as her fingers fumbled across the yarn, they landed on something else. Something long, and narrow, and pointed. Like a stick, or a needle.
A knitting needle.
In the last second Keisha had before she blacked out, she grabbed hold of the knitting needle with her right hand and swung it up and over her shoulder. As hard as she could.
The scream was only an inch from her ear. And it was horrific.
As the grip on Keisha’s neck slackened, she tumbled forward out of the chair. She collapsed onto the floor, wheezing and gasping for breath. She was on her knees. Air rushed into her lungs so quickly it hurt. Her gasps would have been loud enough to hear from anywhere in the house, were it not for Wendell Garfield’s cries of agony.
Keisha, even as she struggled to get her breath back, had to turn and see what she had done.
The knitting needle was sticking straight out of Garfield’s right eye. Blood poured from the socket, spattering the right side of his face. Judging by how much of the needle remained exposed, Keisha figured that a good four to five inches of it was buried in his head.
But he could see her with his left eye, and, still screaming, he started coming around the chair after her.
Keisha struggled to her feet and tried moving for the door. But she hit her knee going around the corner of the coffee table and stumbled, allowing Garfield to get close enough to clamp his hand onto her arm.
“You bitch!” Garfield said, although there was so much blood in his throat it sounded as though he was gargling.
Garfield yanked so hard on her arm that Keisha went down to the floor again. She ended up sprawled on her back. Before she had a chance to roll away, he landed on top of her, straddling her.
He didn’t have the sash anymore. He was going to have to make do with his hands.
He leaned forward, the knitting needle still sticking out of his eye socket, blood dripping onto Keisha, and got his fingers and thumbs around her neck. She flailed about, but his hands had her neck pinned to the floor.
She started blacking out again. With her last ounce of strength, she shot the heel of her hand straight up against the end of the knitting needle.
She drove it into Garfield’s head another three inches.
There was another scream, and then, for a moment, he seemed to freeze above her. His grip on her neck relaxed, his arms went weak, and his body collapsed on top of her.
This time, Keisha didn’t even take time to get her breath back. She pushed frantically at his dead body until it was off of her, crawled a few feet away, and then, once she was able to breathe normally again, decided she was entitled to take a moment and become hysterical.