About as much use as a...

This week I wrote a short story inspired by the Christmas ghost tales a friend has been publishing recently. This isn't a ghost story but it does contain a confectionary item I always associate with Christmas.

She took the hammer from the box, placed the business end between her two front teeth and then bore down until the crack thundered inside her skull. As the cheap approximation of chocolate splintered and the plastic taste tickled the tip of her tongue, she was taken back to her childhood, to her fifth Christmas and the habit formed, before even then, of leaving the best to last. She was never quite sure why the adjustable spanner was that choice- maybe the intricacy of the gears, or the amount of confectionery compared to the saw or the screwdriver? It was definitely her favourite though. A pity. It lay there, a disappointment, poorly detailed when compared with her recollection... Had they actually grown so over the years, commercial pressures, the general laziness of the current generation of sugar peddlers, compared with the sweet manufacturers of the past? It certainly seemed less impressive, less meticulous. Perhaps some regulation meant it had to have the same amount of whatever it was that passed for chocolate as the other tools? Each year she grew less enchanted with the way things were going. You can buy licorice in the shape of a gun now. When she was a child there was an old forties movie they showed on television one rainy afternoon with Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy where he’d pulled one out, waved it around, only to bite off its end. But that was Hollywood. A little cheap, a little tacky. Nowadays the whole world was too. She picked up the cartoonish revolver, her fingers sticking to the grip, cocked the hammer and the crack thundered inside her skull.