• The girl sat in the cemetary alone.

    She was huddled up in jeans and a hoodie, holding it tightly to her to fight off some of the icy wind that blew over the brown hills. Crows called racously as they took off into the gray sky. She watched them absently before turning back to the gravestone in front of her. Her grandmother's name was etched there, and as she saw it, she couldn't help but think of past times. In the wind's whisper she heard the laughing of children as they ran around her grandmother's house, fighting invisible enemies and saving eachother time and time again, before going back inside to dinner, where plates of macaroni and cheese lay in wait. In the rustle of grass she heard her grandmother laugh at her, as she mistook a toaster for an ancient video game.

    Finally, she tore her gaze away from the stone and turned to the other end of the cemetary.

    There were no trees behind the barbed wire fence there. Only one, and on the top branch, a single crow perched. There used to be a huge forest there. Faintly she remembered the deer and the rabbits that would peer out at her as she walked along the fence, and she rememebered the screams of metal as the trees that had been her friends for so long were ripped from the ground.

    She shook her head to drive the sounds away before adjusting her position, sitting cross legged on the grass and tugging out her social studies book. The need to get homework done in a silent place was the reason she was here in the first place. But Fate seemed to dislike her. The page she opened to showed an elderly Native American woman, hands folded in her lap, and on the adjacent page, a quote was there.

    "In the roar of the river I heard the laughter of the children in the village, but I hear it no longer. And now I know that the time of the Indians is over."

    She looked up from the page and soberly looked over the cemetary. Things had changed so much since her childhood. Sighing quietly, she looked back at the gravestone.

    It looked like that time was over now, too.