I can't write short stories

I've written about this many times and here's it again: I have a very hard time coming up with a complete story, that people find satisfying, in less than a few thousand words. It's not even about writing a good story -- I've long given up on the aspiration of writing something good -- I can't come up with anything at all.

How do you get your readers to care for the characters they don't know anything about? Do you spend your time building characters, building the setup, or like, in moving the plot along? And even if you have any proper structure, does the reader even care about the lion and the mouse or whatever, or is it just something they read because their child wants them to? What do children want?

It's not the complexity I'm afraid of. Complexity is easy. You slather in more words and characters and refuse to edit out, and you've got a pile of crap. It's the simplicity that's so frikkin' hard. Perhaps I read one too many O' Henry and Chekhov (that I did) but a story that doesn't have something 'deeper' doesn't feel right to me, so I cannot make myself write simple stories. Any attempt to right a 'layered' short story is of course a total failure any way.

Perhaps I should pause my current attempt to complete the novel to take a step back into writing coherent stories.

Resources:

One of my favorite writing tips comes from Kurt Vonnegut: “start as close to the end as you can.” That is even more important in short stories than in novels.

  From here