Here is little Damiana!
Also here's
THE VIDEO:
And now, the story I wrote for her:
Damiana's Disappointing Present
Damiana had very high hopes for this coming Christmas.
She had been a very good girl all year.
Almost all year.
Outside it had been snowing and snowing, and snowing some more. That was good. It covered all
those holes in the garden, and the new
temporary ugly patch on the wall of the kitchen.
The Orphanage was not one of the warmest places in town to begin with, what was another little hole in the wall? At least there was a roof over their heads.
Damiana was sure no one would remember those past
unfortunate incidents…
Like the crickets in Mrs. Blatherby's bedroom. It had been Damiana’s attempt to bring the outdoors
in. Plus they made fun pets too. They seemed to not like real food. They didn’t even touch the oniony liver she left for them under Mrs. Blathersby’s bed.
They mostly wanted to eat cotton fabric, so it was not an extra expense. There was plenty of cotton around the principal’s room.
And they were so cheerful singing all the time. Especially at night, hop-hop-hopping here and there.
The muddy flood in the music room had been a
failed attempt at decoration. She wanted to make a water fountain by the piano, because it is so nice to hear the tinkling of crystal clear water falls and piano music notes…
It had been a lot of work, too: making all those holes in the yard to gather the water outside, then carrying it up bucket by bucket since the room was on the second floor.
Regrettably the water was not so clear at that point anymore, therefore it did not tinkle quite as expected.
But that was a different matter altogether.
Unfortunately the nuns did not agree with the tinkling, the holes in the garden, the muddy stairs, or the messy piano keys.
And that accident in the kitchen? It was just that, an
accident.
What’s a girl to do when her little hands and feet are cold and there’s a lonely fire in the kitchen, all alone in there? No one was using it, and it was too tiny a flame to warm up anything
anyway. So… she made it bigger.
The cook, Mrs. Milleford Skimpole, said they would take weeks and weeks to fix that big gaping hole in the wall, get rid of the stench of smoke, and it would take forever to fix all the shattered glass in the windows.
The hinges on the back door were already stained, crooked and squeaky. Everybody knew that! … OK, maybe they were not so
shrill before.
The worse insult for Mrs. Skimpole was that, after she complained bitterly about her Holiday Fruit-cakes being all ruined, burnt and soggy, little Damiana told her sweetly not to be sad, because
absolutely no one would tell the difference.
The kitchen did not smell so bad to Damiana, just like extra-extra extra crispy gingerbread smoky cookies.
One teacher said Damiana was going to need a lot of luck-- a lot of
real good, blessed and holy-water-sprinkled-on luck, to get anyone to adopt her now, with all this on her record.
Drat!
So it was going to be boring in there, and maybe colder.
Oh, but how exciting it had been to wake up on Christmas morning! She got up fast, fast, fast and went running downstairs to open her present. She wanted to be the first one getting there and start unwrapping.
She opened it, and… what a disappointment!
A pair of socks?? An old pair of stinky socks! And not even a matching pair either! All year waiting… for
this?
Well, if this is what you get after being so good all year, she was not going to behave anymore.
Humm… Where are those scissors?
