Voila! The mysterious reproductive habits of the to-go cup, at last caught on film.

Payphones form part of that reef of obsolescence that defines the modern city. The cups, deposited as planulae, grow upon them like coral polyps.

Pedestrians (fig. 2) are the drifting milt of the city. Payphone-reefs accrete their detritus (fig. 3).

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I think of the phones we made as children by tying a string between two paper cups. I don’t remember what I said into them. Maybe, if I could find the cup, it would still be there, like in the cartoons, where you scream into a paper bag and then hand it to somebody. Aaaaah, like that, right out of the bag.

Each cup has a residue and a story: the bite radius of the lipstick along the edge of the top, the chewed end of a straw, the grease smudging a logo.

And maybe, if I could pry the phones open, and all the coins spilled out like from a slot machine, each coin, like each cup, would tell a story, would speak a desire, like the coins thrown into a well, or its aftermath, like the ones dropped into a beggar’s cup.