The Sadness Box
Novelette 13,480 words Recommended by 6 award/anthology sources
"Okay, so you know those things they sell called ‘useless machines’?” the inventor says. He is 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..."
Content warnings 2
body-horrorviolence
Quasar links out; the story lives on Clarkesworld, where the author gets the click.