Author Paul Griner tells us about the origins of his short short “The Loneliness Diet“:

I’ve moved around a lot, both before and after I married. I was born in Boston, lived in DC, back in Boston, upstate New York, outside Philly, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Cambridge England, Portugal, Boston, Portugal, Cambridge Mass, upstate New York again, Louisville. I’ve liked (or loved) all of those places to varying degrees, but in each, I’ve been lonely at times as well. A year or two ago, I was offered a job in a new state, and I almost took it, but I found myself a bit wary of being lonely again, of my wife and I starting over trying to make new friends. It was daunting, and I think the story is partially about that.

And in my neighborhood, there’s a couple that walks by the house two or three times a day. For years they did it with their dog, but with when their dog died last year, they kept up the walks, now carrying only the dead dog’s decorative collar. They grew thinner, I noticed, and never spoke, and that intrigued me. I’ve said hello to them many times, and spoken with them now and again, enough to know what they do for work and which house they live in, but beyond that, I find them mysterious. And I think I often write to try and find out what I think of others’ lives.

But all of that is of course after-the-fact speculation. All I know for sure is that I had the story’s first line, that image of a couple washing their own skin before eating it, and I wanted to know what it meant.