In my dream, we are walking through a village where everyone has died of the plague.
It’s a small hamlet, only a dozen buildings—all cobblestone and wood, with a simple church at one end and a well at the other. Every single person is dead. Every child, every love, every baby.
The first days we make a big fire and burn all of the corpses. We burn every stitch of clothing, every pillow, every blanket. It’s the Black Plague, nasty business. We let the bonfire burn for days, feeding it every scrap that might hold that sickness in it.
Then we sort through the houses, find where we might like to live. The whole town is ours. We make a library of all the diaries we find—a binder of all the deeds and wills and certificates of birth.
We make a family tree. We decide who we will be if anyone ever comes and asks.
We make a life in the ashes of the town. It only takes a winter and a spring before it feels like home. We read all the diaries like history books.
We decide to read poetry out loud in the church every morning when we wake. We pick houses next to each other, so that we have space, but we are close enough.
Sometimes we sleep together, sometimes we sleep apart.
You find a dog and then two. The cats come later.
We are happy in our village. The ghosts seem to accept what we have done.