|
|
The night of September 12 was dark and stormy. It was the night that Mina was born.
Mina was a tiny little baby girl. Her feet were only the size of your little finger. Some people thought Mina was cute but others thought she would turn out to be the most horrible little girl ever!
At night after all the lights had been turned out, Missini crept up the corridor with mummifying type bandages with her. Missini had hated her sister from the first time she had set eyes on her. Whether it was from jealousy of Mina being so beautiful or just from plain superstition, I don't know. By now Missini was in Mina's bedroom and was nearly finished wrapping her feet. Mina didn't have the slightest clue that her feet were being wrapped up by her sister who was just so jealous. Early every morning before anyone else in the house was awake Missini would creep back into Mina's room and unwrap her feet. This went on for many months.
One morning when Mina was about 20 months old she woke up and said to herself, "My feet feel really numb." She sat up and looked at her feet and saw that they were wrapped up so tightly she couldn't move them. Every day after that she would wake up before dawn and sit and pick at the bandages for hours until she finally would fall asleep again. Every morning Missinki would walk into Mina's room with a smug look on her face. She could see that Mina had been trying to get the bandages off so she just wrapped them even tighter.
Mina was 10 years old before she understood what her sister had done to her. She thought of the pain she would have to go through with her feet. Mina's feet had not grown since she was born because of what Missini was doing to her. She had to have little shoes made just to fit her feet, and when school started again in the summer, the kids would probably tease her because of the size of her feet.
That night in bed Mina decided to have one moire go at getting the bandages off. She'd been picking at them for about ten minutes when she thought she felt something cold on her foot so she looked down and saw the bandage was starting to come off. She unwound the bandages on both feet until finally they were free. She was seeing her feet for the first time ever! What she didn't know was that her sister was about to come over to see her parents as she did every night, so she probably would come up and see her too.
At about 9.45 that night Missini came bounding up the stars to see if Mina's feet were still tied up. When Missini got there, she thought that Mina's feet were still wrapped up, but she looked closer and she could see that Mina had somehow unwrapped them. When Missini saw this she was so extremely angry, she was furious. Unfortunately for Mina who was now asleep Missini again carefully wrapped the bandages around Mina's feet and crept back downstairs, saying goodnight to her parents as if nothing had happened.
The next morning when Mina woke, she said to herself, "Please, please don't let this be happing again." She started to pick at the bandages again and this time got them off first time. Since she was feeling a little bit evil because of the cruel treatment being done to her, she said to herself, "Why should Missini get away with doing this to me. It's cruel and she should be punished."
Mina had had enough, so she decided she would go and report what Missini had been doing to her to the Police. Little did she know that her evil sister would be watching every move she made.
At the table the next morning Mina's mother asked her, like any mother would, "What are you doing today, sweetie?"
To that Mina replied, "Oh you know. Just the usual." But as you and I know, Mina was lying.
As soon as her mother left to go to work, Mina left to walk to Police Headquarters. Missini had heard Mina talking to herself the night before and knew what Mina was intending to do. As Mina was walking along the path, she kept looking over her shoulder because she had a strange feeling that someone was following her.
Mina rang the bell at the Inquiry desk at Police Headquarters and asked to speak to Constable Tushna Yokomo. After waiting for a while she was shown into an Interview Room. When Mina was in the room ready to speak to Constable Tushna, she tensed up for some reason and nearly didn't say anything, but then she said to herself, "Look. You came here to tell the police what has been happening and you're here now so tell all!"
Then suddenly as if out of the blue the whole story spilled out .. of how Missini hated her and what she had been doing to her. When she had finished, Constable Tushna said to her, "You'll have to make an official statement." Mina nodded her head. She was willing to do whatever she had to stope Missini doing this any more. One her way out, Constable Tushna said to her, "It takes real courage to come and complain about a member of your family for doing something like this."
In the early hours of the next morning, Mina heard a car pulling into the driveway. It could only be one person - Missini! But Mina was so tired after the day she had had that she fell asleep. When Mina woke the next time, expecting to be in her nice warm cosy bed, she suddenly realised she was lying on the back seat of her sister's car with a gag over her mouth. "Oh, you're awake, are you? Well, your life is over now." Mina was watching carefully where her sister was going, when she saw the flicker of an arrow on the dashboard. SHE CAN'T BE TURNING - there is now road or even a track here. But to Mina's amazement, there was a small clearing through the bush just wide enough for the car to drive through. When they were rally into the bush, Missini stopped the car and told Mina to be quiet and get out of the car. Mina did as she was told, but she was absolutely terrified when she saw the flash of the knife blade behind Missini's back.
Mina could hear the wailing of sirens vaguely in the distance and she saw someone bending over her telling her it was going to be all right and that her sister had been arrested and was at Police Headquarters. She slowly drifted off to sleep and woke up later in hospital.
The next morning Mina's parents were beside her bed staring out the window. They rushed over to her bedside when she woke up and her mother said, "Oh! I'm so sorry, sweetie. I had no idea that your sister was doing such things to you. Why didn't you tell up sooner? We would have done something about it. Don't worry about the court hearing. It's not for another few months and Missini is going to be held in jail until that date, and she'll never be allowed to come near you ever again. The main thing is that you're alive. Go back to sleep and rest, my little one. Goodnight."
Andrew Bart, Kimberley Birt, Monique Cannell, Becky Christopherson, Emma Craggs, Hollie Crowley, Jennifer Eustace, Rebecca Evans, Alicia Eyres, Kieran Goulter, Mary Huntress, Robert Illingworth, Katie Kilpatrick, Siobhan Kranz, Kate Norsgaard, Samantha Ong, James Ramsey, Nathan Rieck, Ben Sielaff, Aleisha Sutton, Ruth Thomson, Michael Ward, Alex Wells, Jessica Weston, Kathleen Williams
Return to Report