Hed of the (rapidly fading) month

Heds like this seem to call forth the literary analogies, but they're actually pretty common. "No beer" doesn't mean no individual, mortal beer; it means an absence of beer where beer could reasonably -- OK, this is the cop blotter, so a there's a limited range of values for "reasonably" -- have been expected to be:

South Carolina authorities say a 44-year-old woman angry at a man for returning home without beer on Christmas beat and stabbed him with a ceramic squirrel.

And that, alas, clears up the other ambiguity. She didn't take out to do violence to every ceramic squirrel on the block; she hit him upside the head with a handy one, then apparently kept going after it broke. Life only imitates Elmore Leonard because Elmore Leonard imitates life.

And it wouldn't be a four-graf AP national story about episodic holiday crime if it didn't add some value to the local report:

It wasn't known if she had a lawyer.

Because if it was known, the AP would have called the lawyer for a comment! Though if it really wanted to do her a favor, it could think about not naming either the victim or the perp (nobody's being nominated for a federal judgeship or anything here, after all) when it takes local crime worldwide just for laffs.