Garet's View

 

The short story is The Ghost Town Collectives; it was written by Britney Corrigan; and it is available to read at:  https://www.terrain.org/2020/fiction/the-ghost-town-collectives/.  It is the story of 51 year old Liam McDaniel.  That was the year he bought a ghost town in Colorado and spent most of the year among ghosts, in the ghost town he bought.

“Liam’s circumstances were unusual for their raw improbability. Perhaps you understand this from within circumstances of your own. You know Liam, sympathize with his loss. Perhaps you lost someone, too.”

Look into the short story by Brittney Corrigan to learn all manner of collective nouns and read her wonderful if melancholy story of Liam who lost wife daughter and son to the Covid virus.  Reading the short story you will learn that: “A group of patients is called a virtue. A group of doctors is called a doctrine. There is no definitive collective noun for corpses. There are many names for a group of trees. A clump, a forest, a coupe. A grove. A thicket. A stillness. A stand.”  “There is no agreed upon name for a collective of tears.”

When you finish reading the story you can decide for yourself which if any of the collective nouns are real or if they were all invented in the story.