It Beats; It Grieves (2026)

Right outside of Branson, there's a Museum of Failed Inventions.

It costs five dollars to go in, and they give you a sturdy brochure. There are five floors joined by a mid-century atomic floating escalator. You have to walk up the escalator, but the entire apparatus is made of glass.

On the third floor, there is a 24k-gold digital clock in a thick crystal dome on a vibrating gold plate with a small hole drilled through for the wires. Underneath the metal plate is an intricate defibrillation system intended to revive time. A woman made it to restore the thirty minutes the one she loved was dead for. She said she had also died during that time. He deserved that time back.

On the second-floor landing, there's an old brass typewriter, the Apology Machine, meant to process your list of guilts and griefs and morph it into an apology with iron rhetoric that twists the heart of its recipient.

I tried it myself once--if you scroll your list through the barrel twice, the machine thinks for a minute, and then it starts to work. It averages about 90wpm and writes damn good apologies. I was able to read the first part of it as it emerged above the stamps. But after the document shot out--you have to watch out; it really shoots out--I realized it's on disappearing ink. By the time I caught it, there was nothing left to read.

At the fourth-floor gate is the work of von Karmen, the eccentric Flemish inventor and adventurer known for freezing to death in Greenland next to Regret Furnace. The invention featured in this museum is the Beloof Kompas, or Promise Compass. It's a simple silver locket on a chain, and when you open it, it's meant to point toward promises that are still being kept. But you can hear the needle whirring even before you open the locket up. It never settles.

On the lower level, there are identical twin beds connected by copper wires. Above both are apparatuses with descending cranial electrodes. This is Atlas Vaughn's Dream Condenser, which is meant to condense a couple's dreams into the same dream. It would have met uproarious success were it not for the fact that it mistakes resemblance for failure.

Once there was a traveling exhibit that featured Inheritance Sieves. These were heirloom pieces you kept inside a locket or cigarette case--fine platinum filters meant to separate love from obligation. The problem was they didn't let much through at all. They're very pretty held up to the light.

In the foyer, there is an extensive table of perfumes that people from all over the world tried to make that smell like certain people, usually the one they loved the most. Now none of them smell like anything but oil, and all of the people are dead.

The only thing that costs money is a red phone box. It's the only payphone in the world that's really in use anymore.

It calls anyone from your past. Your time limit is one minute. The creator swears it works, but it hasn't worked since the first try.

And there's a line out the front door of the museum, just for a dime and a minute in the phone box. It smells like stale urine in there, and the windows have tens of thousands of initials and messages carved into them. Among them are "Whoever's calling Marcus Aurelius, stop crying," "Marilyn Monroe ghosted me," "Tell Shakespeare his plays sucks," and my personal favorite, "Bot truck w my card then u die? Fuck u Daryl." Then a CashApp handle.

How would I know the phone box smells like pee? I've been in it. Don't play coy and ask who I would call.

Of course I know what I would say. All the things I've left unsaid:

There is nothing I love more than spending my life having loved you most deeply.

There is nothing that slakes my thirst like ever having looked at you;

that inverts gravity like having you near me.

You may not know me very well anymore, but I love you.

I have spent years trying to discover whether love survives its object.

It does.