Not a sweet cake, but in this case the sight of a hammer:
The doors to the old garage are open, as is usual. The hinges are worn and perhaps for that reason, a hammer has been placed just inside the doorway; sometimes the hinges needed to be given a good whack to keep them in place. My sister is standing at the end of the garage building, near where our father has added on a chicken coop at the far end, near the stairs to the hayloft. There are two barrels there, one of black metal, the other of rust colored corrugated cardboard. She is eleven years old and is about to scoop out some scratchfeed or cracked corn to appease the flock.
He is a teenager, about 15 or 16, a friend of the family and a frequent visitor to the property. It is a summer day, and also as usual, nothing much is happening, could be described as boring I suppose. He approaches the garage, and picks up the hammer. And as suddenly as he picked it up, he launches it with all his strength in the direction of my sister, shouting at the same moment for her to duck down. She did, and the hammer smashed into the barn wall right at the level where her head had been just seconds before.
I see her face, ashen and scared, as she stands up and realizes what has taken place. I suppose he is relieved to see that she has not been harmed by his sudden impulse, but nothing further was ever said, as far as I recall. Sometimes a violent act has consequences, other times not.
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