"These People Mean Nothing to Each Other" is a 2,200 word short story. Its scenes give brief peeks into the lives of a store clerk who is certainly not a meth addict; an acerbic married couple watching "Dancing With the Stars"; a man on disability, helping a friend for beer; and a man alone with his cancer diagnosis.
The characters do not know one another, or care about each other, and are in fact unaware of the others. But in the background of each tiny and banal piece of their lives there's a subtle piece of connective tissue. By the end of the story, the dreadful unifying event has never been stated, never described, but is as clear to the reader as it is opaque to the characters.
As with my last eternal short story project, I'm hoping to get this story out to a wider audience. In fact, I tried to ransom it out previously, in the days before Kickstarter, as you can see here. At that time, I got to 63% of funding. I think that with Kickstarter, we can easily get the rest of the way there.
Once fully funded, the story gets released under a Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike license. Every donor, in addition, gets a podcast of me reading it.
"These People Mean Nothing to Each Other" is a brief, bitter slice of American self-obsession, written to the same high standards as the award-winning "Regret, With Math." I hope you'll enjoy your taste of it.
-G.
A podcast of me reading the story, which means you get to hear what I'd sound like as a middle aged woman insulting her husband right to his face.