The Ghost Town Collectives and Other Stories for the Anthropocene
By Brittney Corrigan
Middle Creek Publishing | 2024 | 251 pages
Brittney Corrigan’s short story collection, The Ghost Town Collectives, dedicated “with apologies” to “the endlings,” the children of our assured end, deals in minuscule moments with monumental implications. Worlds hinge upon a tiny drawing of a deer. Tylenol capsules. Seeds. An island on the verge of being eaten by the ocean. A whistle. Frogs. Ashes.
In “Woolly,” the collection’s opening story, it’s footsteps: without large grazing animals “[stamping] around snuffling for grass in the snow,” the permafrost is imperiled and greenhouse gases pour into the atmosphere, Earth poisoning Earth. This self-destruction is mirrored in the body of our narrator Elle’s twin sister, whose cancerous cells keep “dividing and dividing and dividing until her blood forgets how to be her own.” Elle works in a lab editing the genes of the Asian elephant, the closest living relative of the woolly mammoth, while her own closest living relative, her equal and opposite, suffers. Feverishly, against both an intimate and a global clock, Elle pours herself into creating a chimera: either an organism with two sets of DNA or an unrealizable dream, depending on which side the coin lands.
While Corrigan’s vivid Anthropocene teeters on many expertly woven brinks, the reader stares into a deep abyss of climate consequences—ones already upon us and ones still to come, dreamlike yet all too personal. In several, progressively larger ways, it is too late: a sister grows cold with death; an entire family save the patriarch is lost, one by one, to a pandemic; hungry brothers walk the desert together, stalked by humans with long-nosed machines; endangered species become extinct as their last living being passes into the afterlife. Still, there is hope on the page, tiny bright flashes of it. There are still those grappling with What Has Been Lost and What Should Be Done in the face of The Damage. In “The Auction House,” a thimble worn around our narrator’s neck is what carries enough weight to tip the scales away from cynical, carnivorous consumerism and toward conservation.
And all the while, connection and love have not yet been razed: “It was so cold, I almost forgot who I was. But then I remembered you.” Our daughter of “The Great Unconformity” searches for her lost father and dreams of what he will say when they find each other. A spark to keep going, to keep looking for a better ending. In “Flight Path,” two young siblings shelter each other, where the rest of the world can’t see them, and where “they can rest until they’re ready to change.” Women in “The Care Home” grieve worlds’ worth of sharp grief together.
Said straight, an honest look at the destruction our kind has conjured leaves the reader with much despair to digest. But we deserve it, don’t we? It is fitting that almost half of the stories in the collection are narrated by or centered on, at least in part, an animal or a child. Our most vulnerable, our innocents. The ones that will remain, until. And in this moment? How will we choose to meet one another in the wreckage? In her striking stories, Brittney Corrigan makes one thing clear: there is no neutral in the face of extinguishment. Everyone and everything must eventually take a side. The Ghost Town Collectives is for all time, but especially now.
Read Brittney Corrigan’s short story “The Ghost Town Collectives,” originally published in Terrain.org.
Olivia Nesselroade was born and raised in California’s Central Valley. She currently lives, writes fiction, and works as a legislative editor in Denver, Colorado. Her previous work has been published in Uppercase Magazine, carte blanche, and LandLocked (formerly Beecher’s) under a pseudonym. By exploring in her stories the intersection of queerness, religious trauma, and family systems, she imagines for herself, and for other queer folks like her, a new definition of home. Something new is forthcoming, at some point.
Header photo of woolly mammoth by Mammut, from the Royal BC Museum, Victoria, British Columbia, courtesy Wikimedia. CC 2.0.
