You are listening to a Clark's World magazine podcast with your host and narrator, Kate Baker.

Greetings, Clark's World Citizens. I have this podcast find you extraordinarily well.

Welcome to our fourth story for the month of July, 2022, issue 190.

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So our story is titled the sadness box and is by Suzanne Palmer.

Suzanne Palmer, who is no stranger here to Clark's World, can be found at the website zansjan.net and that is Z-A-N-Z-J-A-N.

Suzanne is a writer, artist, and Linux system administrator who lives in Western Massachusetts with her kids, lots of chickens, and an Irish wolf-hound named Tolkien.

She won the 2018 he'd go for best novelette for her Clark's World story, the secret life of bots,

and its sequel Bots of the Lost Ark is a nominee for the 2022 Hugo. She has no idea what color her hair is anymore.

And if you like what you've here today, you can go back to Bots of the Lost Ark by Suzanne Palmer, Dave's head, the painter of trees, 33% Joe, and the aforementioned the secret life of bots.

So my dear listener, I hope you can sit back, relax, and let me tell you a story.

Okay, so you know those things they sell called useless machines? The inventor says he's smiling.

Of course, the boy knows them. He'd briefly had one that had been plucked from his bedroom floor and relocated into the inventor's basement workroom almost immediately,

as if his father had been lurking and waiting for the chance, and the excuse to confiscate it and make it his own.

The boy never understood why his father did this with gifts, give, and then take back, but there had been several over the years,

the nuclear winter snow globe, a perpetual motion silly string machine, and countless other cheaply made cheap and down wonders that were only briefly in his possession.

What the boy wants is good hiking boots, a better face filter, and the expensive skin cream that blocks radiation,

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