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| Branches swayed, and leaves rustled in the late autumn breeze. Trees dancing in the wind had taken root in an old graveyard, now speckled with fallen leaves, and covered by overgrown grass. The cemetery stretched out across mediocre hills and dips in the land, situated on the outskirts of a small rural town. Throughout this timeless burial ground, narrow dirt pathways ran in all directions from one side of the cemetery to the other. At the end of one of these paths was a section splattered with tiny gravestones, some no larger than the body they marked. Heading the entrance of this area was a granite stone bearing the name of the land. �Babyland,� it was aptly and grotesquely called. It was here where one would find the ancient woman sulking day after day. Her hair had long since been taken over by the silver of age, and her face bared the mark of having spent too many hours beneath a scorching sun. She sat on a half-rotted wooden bench in the middle of the land dedicated to the ones whose life had been stolen too soon. Those who came to visit deceased loved ones would see the gray-haired lady sitting primly with a look of sorrow upon her face. If they had dared to venture a glance to her icy eyes holding the deepest despair, they would have felt her loss. Yet few dared. While some sympathized with her pain, others simply thought her insane, which was reasonable enough; she would often appear to be speaking to someone, though her face remained cold and her eyes distant. Few guessed that perhaps she was reanimating the child she�d lost. For many years, the old woman would spend the day resting on her bench. No one ever spoke to her, or inquired as to why she wouldn�t more on with her life; some questions are too difficult to form. Only those who visited the graveyard regularly would have noticed that one day she wasn�t at her place on the rotted bench, or that her picture was in the newspaper the next day in the obituary section: �No surviving family.� Now the brightly colored leaves float to the gravestones and land at the feet of a young mother and her daughter dancing about in the tall grass. Their faces are animated and filled with love as they hold hands and stare into each other�s warm, soft eyes leaping with laughter. |
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