, July 11, 2025
Real Human Bones for Sale
“I can’t find anyone who will actually do it well,” Tom said when we met for coffee. I wore a great outfit: cowboy boots, a long denim skirt, and a top that said, Blow Me, I’m Irish. I’d put a lot of thought into the proper effect. “No one writes with their dick out anymore,” he was saying. “Nobody takes what they want to say and just slaps it on the table.”
“So true,” I said. But I felt strange about it. My writer dick is probably flaccid and shriveled up. Definitely circumcised. Not the thick, veiny, uncut monster cock he was looking for. Tom is the largest retailer of human bones on the continent; he’s in search of a capable freelance copywriter for an artist’s statement. When he first reached out, I Googled “toms bones” and a flood of articles filled my screen: one in the Washington Post called To Bone or Not to Bone? That is the Question for Gen-Z Retailer of Human Remains and one in Vulture called Meet the Man Behind TikTok’s Million-Dollar Bone Marketplace. I keep trying to hype myself up. It’s not that I want to get haunted, and I’m definitely too young to get canceled for profiting off the sale of human remains. But I need the clips. The least I could do was entertain the prospect.
“So, what do people actually do with these? When they buy them?” I asked. Satanic rituals? Sexual acts? The website didn’t say, and science seemed unlikely.
“It’s a whole range,” he says. “Art, educational purposes. That’s why we’ve built such a community—there’s no singular use for the human body after death.”
“What’s in it for you?”
“Death is like a covered tunnel,” he said. “Light, then darkness, then supreme light.”
He took a long breath. His concave chest rose and fell, sparkling like Edward from Twilight. “You know how people say they feel when they stand in front of the Grand Canyon? That’s how I feel in front of a skeleton. It’s how I’ve always felt. Like this is the absolute core of life, and everything above it—skin, flesh, fat—is just superfluous. Strip every living thing clean, and bones are what we all have in common.”
“Almost every living thing,” I said.
“Even plants have skeletons. Rigid walls that keep their structure and form. See, this is the kind of stuff I want to educate people on.”
He’s very gaunt and beautiful, if not exactly hot. But I liked certain things about him, like the way he inhaled through his teeth when he was excited. Before I left, we followed each other on Instagram. Nobody with that many followers had ever followed me first before.
I wrote nothing for Tom all week because I was busy with my day job writing sycophantic copy for Meowmania (“Litter-ally Me”). Then I had to get high for 4/20. I thought getting high would free me from my inhibitions, but it turns out the inhibitions might be what give me anything to say at all. Sontag once wrote, “I go to my typewriter as I might go to my machine gun.” I go to my Macbook Air as I might go to my kazoo. I Googled “artists statement example,” copied and pasted the first few sentences, and made the nouns and adjectives about Tom.
Tom Hughes is an artist and amateur osteologist based in New York City, I wrote.
That seemed fine. But did it have its dick out? I was willing to cast aside moral questions about the origins of the bones or the politics of the project. Didn’t everything require ethical equivocation? Weren’t most magazines owned by edgy billionaires who wanted e-girls to think they were deep? At least Tom had a mission. For inspiration I scrolled all the way back on his Instagram page, until he was thirteen, twelve, eleven, smiling next to a dead mouse. I texted Ophira, hoping she could send me a sample artist statement or something.
“Is this the bones thing?” she wrote back. “Maybe,” I said.
“Girl, you’re going to hell.”
I kept copy and pasting lines from other artist’s statements I found online and changing them to be about Tom. Why reinvent the wheel when someone had already produced it? Even that phrase, “reinvent the wheel,” is a perfect example. I could reach for a million other metaphors and nothing else would ever capture the feeling of redundancy so perfectly. So I gave up and reached for the trusty wheel again. I turned in a draft and hoped for the best.
We met for drinks in the East Village. I wore leather pants and a cropped tank top that said, Hot Body in big, sans serif font. We sat at the bar in an omakase restaurant that only had two seats. Tom suggested we have a few pieces while we were there and gave the chef a friendly nod, at which point he commenced shaping tiny bites of nigiri, torching pieces of tuna with an open flame, piling little bubbles of orange roe on a slab of uni. Everything Tom wore looked expensive and tailor-made. All black, vaguely Eastern. He was precise. He fastened the black pearl buttons up to the base of his neck.
“I like you, Bari,” he said. We were sitting next to each other, which made eye contact difficult. “But I’m not feeling this draft. It’s just missing something. I don’t want another version of the website copy.”
“Maybe I could try again? I heard about this new generative software, I could start there—”
The look on his face made me stop talking. He didn’t want software, he didn’t want experimentation, he didn’t even want another draft; he didn’t think it was worth salvaging. All the affirmation of my talentlessness cohered in front of me.
“Hey, hey,” he said. “I’m not finished. Here’s the truth—and I’m not in the business of lying. You’re not a writer. It’s not about grammar; it’s not about content. You just don’t have something strong to say. I’m sorry, I know it’s hard to hear that.” He delivered it with a smile, as if he was doing me a favor. “But I think you’re special. You’ve got this magnetism. I don’t know how else to describe it. And I still want to work together.
“Oh. In what capacity?” I said.
Tom made eye contact with the chef again and nodded. The chef nodded back, then nodded at me, wiped his knife clean with the edge of his apron, and disappeared past a door behind the bar.
“There’s another kind of collaboration,” Tom said. He took a sip of water. In the moment, I thought he wanted to fuck me. Maybe he was rich enough to keep me as a concubine. I could think of worse things. He could put me up in an apartment under the showroom; I could tell my roommate to find a subletter. I could give him head every now and then, I could even let him piss on me. It would be like joining one of those fashionable sex clubs without having to apply.
He reached down and pulled a piece of paper out of his Shinola messenger bag. He slid it over to me. “You believe in what we’re doing, right?”
“What who’s doing?”
“You and me,” he said. “All of us in the movement to make osteology, to destigmatize the sale of human remains. You believe in that, body and soul, right?”
“Oh,” I said. “Yeah, me too. That’s why I’m struggling to, you know, put it into words.”
“Good. I think that’s the most important qualification for what I’m proposing.”
“Right, and what exactly is that?”
“This is a contract. It would enter us into a legal partnership, formally donating your bones to the collection.”
I was still holding my chopsticks. I couldn’t figure out where to put them down.
“Take it to a lawyer if you want a second opinion. The gist is you ensure your bones will join the collection. We take care of room and board for the next three years. And sometime within that period—on your own time—we’ll start end of life care.”
He smiled. I smiled. It was the funniest thing I’d ever heard. Bits of rice lodged behind my teeth escaped. I squeezed them out by laughing.
“You want me to kill myself?” I said. “We just met!”
He took my hand; he was not laughing. “Of course not,” he said. “I want you to commit to something larger than yourself.”
“Then why don’t you do it?”
“I plan to—in fact, I’ve already signed a contract myself,” he said. “Mine just has a slightly longer on-ramp, given I’m running the collection and anticipate we’ll need a few more years to really get to scale.”
Even death must wait for Scrum. I wish I had thought of saying that in real time. “I don’t really know about all this,” I said instead.
“It’s always scary to confront the big questions. But I think the more you ask yourself what you’re meant to do, the more you’ll see this makes perfect sense.”
I was pulling at the waistband of my pants. “I’m not really one to make a statement like that.”
“You wouldn’t be making a statement,” he said. “You’d be joining a community.”
This was what cult people said. But there was something compelling about being in his gaze. He made me feel special, selected.
“Besides,” he said, “you want to make a mark on the world. I could see that in you from the very first time we met. This is a chance to do something truly radical, something the world will remember you for. We could even use your writing skills and put them to work for the cause. We collect all the works of our members in an in-house gallery and library, to honor their contributions for posterity.”
I tried to imagine the library, four walls of leather-bound books and shelves made of bones. “Forever?” was the only question I could come up with.
“In perpetuity,” he said.
I took the contract and put it in my bag; the chef returned, and we finished the omakase. Outside the restaurant, he kissed me on the cheek to say goodbye. His lips were so dry. I kept thinking about the time Ophira’s dad died in college and we drove to his funeral in the middle of nowhere South Carolina. He got cremated. The box sat in the middle of an American flag and a wreath, while the priest addressed it directly. “Death is like a covered tunnel,” he said. “Light, then darkness, then supreme light.” We went to Waffle House after and tried to figure out the metaphor. We couldn’t make out which part was supposed to be death and which was life.
I knew Ophira would be judgmental about the contract. By now I had reviewed the terms. The trade was simple: three years of free room and board, food, luxury goods, all your needs and expectations met in exchange for your body. And in the meantime, all of your earthly possessions and artistic achievements would be collected and preserved in Tom’s burgeoning natural history museum, a palatial structure set to open to the public in winter 2028.
Carefully, almost without meeting her eyes, I brought it up. We were watching a Zoom writing class on my couch. I tried to explain Tom’s point about destigmatization. She wore her hair in pigtails and had a silvery maxi dress on. She once told me trans girls either go Miyake or Moschino. I wore pink overalls with strawberry-shaped pockets. Cis-chino.
“Bari, you don’t need this,” she said. “There’s a 100 percent chance these bones are connected to the slave trade, or sex trafficking, or Native American genocide. You don’t want that on your conscience.”
“They’re mostly from medical institutions,” I tried to explain. “Don’t make it about genocide.”
“Everything in America is about genocide.”
I hate how often she’s right. “Yeah, but think about the museum shit. He has a huge following.”
Then she said: “A huge following is not a manuscript.”
The class was just okay. Neither I nor Ophira actually believe these things will help our careers, but at least showing up to them gives us proximity to the literary world. The literary world being, as far as I can tell, a Goopified mass of throuples endlessly trading sexual partners. I don’t even resent them because I know I would join if someone would just invite me.
“Take a deep inhale,” said the writing instructor. “And a deep exhale. What if you walked along the tree-lined path in your mind and picked up twigs and branches along the way?” The class was taught by a popular woman writer whose books Ophira and I used to love. We would send each other tweets of hers and say stuff like “you lol” and “me lol.” Now we don’t send many tweets at all, because Ophira is off social media to “focus on her work.”
The writer told us that she dictates the first drafts of her books over Siri while driving through LA traffic. She laid out various strategies for success, including but not limited to: yoga, watching TV, reading the canon, not stressing too much about the canon, exfoliation, hydration, mindful eating, plant-based eating, raw milk, and Adderall. “Another method I like to use is noun theft,” she said. “This is where you take the nouns from the work you love and put them between your own verbs and adjectives.”
After the lecture she took a rousing round of virtual applause and an hour of questions. I realized that reading her stuff is like looking at a hyper zoomed-in picture of a carrot. Up close, you can delude yourself into thinking it’s Mars or the Sahara or the molten-hot core of the sun, but when you read more, all it does is confirm your suspicion that it’s just been a carrot all along.
I guess that’s not so bad if you’re reward-motivated. Ophira wrote a piece of flash using the noun theft exercise and it immediately got placed in a magazine covered in anime characters and intentionally retro, low-fi web design. One of those e-girl institutions baptized in nostalgia for the early internet, run by waifish dilettantes who believed they were avant-garde because they wanted to say the f-slur. The piece was called “Kill Bill” and it used the nouns from Sza’s song of the same name. “Don’t you feel weird tho,” I texted her, “about stealing a black woman’s nouns?”
I tried to write some copy for the new Meowmania campaign (“Embrace the Paws-kibble”) but kept getting distracted with the contract and got taken off the fall litter box project. I found out in the afternoon that I didn’t get promoted with the rest of my cohort; well, congratulations, fuckers. They get to be managers at the third-largest competitor in the direct-to-consumer-subscription-service-for-cat-food market. I don’t even like cats. The whole company was funded by venture capital, the same hacks who made their fortunes off weapons manufacturing and private prisons. It was cat food. No better or worse than selling human bones.
I put the Meowmania doc aside. I thought of Ophira’s recent publication. What, like noun theft is so hard? It’s Mad Libs; anyone can do it. There’s no magic orb, no secret sauce to the famous writer’s success. Why shouldn’t it work for Ophira, and by extension, for me?
There’s no use in having a family when you’re a soapmaker, I wrote. You’ll come home every night smelling like lavender and hemp.
So I sat down and threw myself into the method. I looked around my apartment for nouns to reappropriate. But the only thing I could find that seemed wordy enough was a purple bottle of Dr. Bronner’s 18-in-1 Hemp Lavender, Pure-Castile soap.
FAMILY SOAPMAKERS SINCE 1858, it read. DR. BRONNER’S 18-IN-1 HEMP LAVENDER PURE-CASTILE SOAP. CERTIFIED FAIR TRADE. MADE WITH ORGANIC OILS. WARNING! Don’t drink soap! Keep out of eyes. If cap clogs, poke it clear. Do not squeeze bottle and shoot out soap. Soap can clog and spurt with pump dispensers. Flush eyes well with water for 15 minutes. Consult a physician if irritation persists. Then it got sort of weird in a culty, messianic Jew kind of way, talking about “Rabbi Jesus” and “Spaceship Earth.” I decided to ignore those parts for now and maybe turn to them later if I got blocked.
There’s no use in having a family when you’re a soapmaker, I wrote. You’ll come home every night smelling like lavender and hemp. That seemed like an interesting direction. But then I had to ask myself if I should treat “fair” as a noun—as in, large public gathering—or as an adjective, as it was being deployed in this context. Actually, in this context, it was “fair trade” as one descriptive concept modifying the soap. Right? And did proper nouns count? What was I to do with Bronner? Could he be a character in the story? Maybe this was a poem, actually, the more that I thought about it.
I fiddled with my soap bottle story for an hour and then deleted the whole thing. Just another tally in the column proving Tom right. I had this feeling of consecution, like everything up until this point had been leading here. Plot constructions, skeletal constructions, architectural constructions, windows. All of this could belong to me—I’d just had my wires crossed. I’d been a museless writer when I should have been a writerless muse. Then Ophira showed up at my apartment, trying to talk me out of it. I sat on my bed, and she stood over me, waving her arms like a windmill.
“This is extremely sketchy-to-illegal territory.” she said. “But you can’t do this, Bari.”
“My life is shit, Ophira,” I said. “I’m twenty-seven years-old, with no money and no prospects—”
“Why are you quoting Pride & Prejudice while we argue about you joining a cult?”
I had forgotten the quote was from Pride & Prejudice; I’d just seen the clip on the internet and recycled it, thinking it was my own. “Anyway,” I said, “you can have all my books.”
“What will you do,” she said, “when the bones trade becomes as mundane as Meowmania?”
“That’s the beauty of it,” I said. “By then I’ll be dead.”
I quit my job at Meowmania and shut my computer before I had time to regret it. Tom’s collection lives high up on the Upper West Side with a south-facing view of the park. I wore my favorite dress—a bunch of tiny cats that look like flowers from far away. I carried a tote bag with just the contract, my wallet, a toothbrush, a change of clothes, a notebook, a recorder, a pen, trappings of the writer I had tried to be. I was making a gamble, taking a risk. I would record our encounter and find a way out in the victory of a story to tell—a huge headline, an exposé, an ambitious decision to keep living. Or I would fail and get three years of the good life for free. It seemed like a win-win.
When I got into Manhattan, I walked up Broadway for fifty blocks and watched the city change. Everything hit me like new. The shops in Chelsea that only sold rainbow-themed pet gear. The way the scaffolding arched itself around Hudson Yards, white beams sloping like a ribcage. I signed in with the doorman in the lobby, then rode an elevator until my ears popped. I could barely hear the ding when I reached the penthouse.
“You’re here,” Tom said. “I’m thrilled to see you.” “Me too,” I said. “I think my mind’s made up.”
“You wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t. Drink?”
He got me a glass of scotch over two dark gray, chilled stones. The light shone amber through the glass. Cases of articulated spines lined the walls, hanging on racks at least ten deep. Drawers full of teeth categorized by shape and age of the deceased fill the center of the room.
“Our goal was to treat everything with care,” he said. “Give them the grace they deserve.”
“I mean, look at this view,” I said. “It’s better than any apartment I’ve ever gotten in life.”
“We keep loose vertebrae in here,” he said, pointing to a huge, mahogany filing cabinet, “and the skulls are rarer, so we give each one a different name.” In a display case, I saw a small skull labeled Barb and a larger one called Jorge.
“It’s strange. I kind of thought it would smell in here—you know, like rotting flesh?”
He laughed. “They’ve all been dipped in ammonia and hydrogen peroxide and stripped of any soft tissue. There’s nothing left to rot.” He put on a pair of gloves and pulled a forlorn rib from the drawer. “A toast. To endings and beginnings.”
We clinked our glasses and wandered toward the window. I tried to imagine my own spine nailed to these walls, my femur in the display case, my tibia articulated alongside my feet. Would my bones look the same as all the others? Or would something set them apart? Would they be cleaner, shinier, skinnier than all the rest?
“Well then,” said Tom. “Now that we’re sufficiently inebriated, shall we go over the terms of this legal contract?”
“What a funny time to rib me, Tom. This is serious business.”
“Oh, rib. I see what you did there. You’re going to acclimate marvelously.”
I dug around for a pen and saw my recorder inside my bag, the red light still blinking on. I looked out at the skyline, a thousand different shades of gleaming phallus erupting into the sky. Maybe I’d finally found my writer dick after all.
“So,” I said. “Before I sign, if we could just go over the terms one more time? I don’t really have a lawyer, so I want to make sure I didn’t miss anything.”
“Absolutely,” said Tom. “Hit me.”
“So, you’ll take care of room and board for three years?”
“Yes, in the floors beneath the collection. In fact, we’ve got several other folks who have joined our movement in the past few months who just moved in. I’d love to introduce you.”
“Voluntarily signed up because they believe in the cause?” I was trying to get at whether anyone had been trafficked without being rude.
“Oh, yes. Leading scientists, artists. They’ve seen the numbers.”
“The big question I had,” I said. “When the time comes, how does it happen?”
He looked down. His face became sad. He was wearing this black Rick Owens set. He could’ve been a young Rick Owens. “It’s a sad day,” he said. “It’s always a sad day.” He took my hand. “The most important thing to know is that you will have a choice in the matter. Lethal injection is most common . . . but we’ve had a few people elect for suffocation.” I looked down and saw that my hand was on my heart. I hadn’t noticed it get there. “We are adamant about community. We come together, we throw parties. It’s a testament to the power of what we do.”
His eyes were filled with tears. I had a story now. I had a primary source—a smoking gun. But I did not want to ruin his life. In Tom’s hand I saw the contract, a beginning and an end. And on the display case, in my bag, there was the recorder, my phone, the pen, the paper—things beyond my bones and body that weighed me down, forced me into a prison of options and ideas and clever banter at awful parties.
“Could I meet them?” I said.
“Well, it’s not typical protocol,” he said. “But we have nothing to hide.”
Down we went, back through the elevator, and got off when we hit 34. The doors opened, and I saw myself reflected in a long wall of floor-to-ceiling mirrors. Across the top, in clean, sans-Serif font, the glass read Residential Floor. I realized Tom was a few steps ahead of me, and I sped up to catch him. “Each participant lives in a furnished one-bedroom on floors 20 to 34. Each unit has a state-of-the-art kitchen in case you choose to cook. But our meals are all covered. Many of us actually enjoy them communally.”
“Got it, got it,” I said. “And are we touring one of the units now?”
“Not presently,” he said, quaintly. “I’ll take you to yours after the paperwork’s complete. I want to be perfectly clear, Bari. There is no changing your mind. When you have faith in something, your mind doesn’t change.” A long, blue vein meandered across his forehead. “When you enter this community, you enter it for life.”
I followed his outstretched arm through a sleek metal archway made of welded replicas of human skulls, all tessellating into each other toward the crest of a baroque cranial parabola. They were so detailed I thought they were real. The room was full of sun, decorated in Cy Twombly scribbles I’d never seen before, pencil on a mass of oil-slicked white canvas. I tried to make out the words. “I Have It,” the painting seemed to say—or else, “I Hate it.” Dozens of people milled about, talking to each other over tiny cortados in ceramic mugs. Creative types with sheeny, barely-there makeup regardless of their gender.
“We keep a full-service espresso bar operating here 24/7,” said Tom, “and though some of our members choose to abstain from alcohol for health reasons, we offer a happy hour.”
I waited to see if he would drink from the bar down here, and when he did not, I avoided it, too. Tom was pulled aside by a tall, heavyset man with long sideburns and became engrossed in conversation. I used the opportunity to wander away. And there she was, in the corner of the meeting hall, barefoot and curled up with her knees to her chest in the center of a plush, cubical, corduroy chair. It was the instructor, the one whose class Ophira and I had watched just days ago from my couch.
“Hey! It’s you,” I said.
“Oh, hi—have we, like, met?” she said. She had flowers braided through her long hair, and her previously raspy, meditative voice had retracted into a Valley girl twang.
“I took your class, like, a few days ago,” I said. “I thought you lived in Los Angeles?”
“Who says Los Angeles?” she said. “Just call it LA.”
“Oh,” I said. I had been so confident in my plan, but it was easy to feel small in front of somebody so successful. “How long have you been here?”
“Maybe like eighteen months? I like to keep a low profile for security reasons.”
“So, your last book—”
“Oh, yeah. I wrote it here. Would never have had the time if I had to work!”
“So all that stuff about noun theft, the dictation—”
“Sweetie. Nobody could write a book like that. I just say it to add some intrigue.”
If she was successful, and this was her choice, who was I to improve on her fatalism?
I felt like I was in one of those dreams where your teeth fall out. She’d cast a hook and I’d bit it, even feeling superior and nodding along while I swallowed. It was difficult to square this version of her—cold, pragmatic—with the artist I’d met over Zoom. Suddenly I felt that the close-up photo of the carrot might actually be the sun or the raw flesh of a neon animal I’d never encounter in the wild. My life was just a matter of scale, of reaching the layer that evaded perception.
“And you . . . like it here?”
“Fuck yeah, girl,” she said. “Best deal I can imagine. I was at a total dead-end before I met Tommy. And he’s got hella connections.”
I looked over at Tom, who was still schmoozing with the large man. This woman had three published novels and a popular newsletter. If anyone was qualified to write an exposé on Tom’s Bones, it was her. Who was I to assume I could do what had escaped her? If she was successful, and this was her choice, who was I to improve on her fatalism? I reached into my bag and gripped the recorder. Never mind about the notes. There was nothing to write if she hadn’t already written it. I looked down to pause the device altogether. I was ready to accept my life here, to give in to my fate. But casting my eyes into the bag turned out to be a mistake. Because then Tom was behind me. He gripped the back of my arm. In my hair he whispered, “Come with me. Now.”
I didn’t have time to say goodbye to the writer. Tom dragged me out of the meeting hall, calmly but forcefully, by the elbow.
“What are you doing?” he whispered through gritted teeth. “What is in your bag?” “Nothing—”
“Show it to me. Show me what you’re doing.”
His eyes were different, cruel, and I felt like a kid getting caught with her phone under the desk. Blood filled my cheeks, and I sheepishly opened my tote to reveal the little Zoom recorder, the red light still blinking my guilt. Tom pulled it out and inspected it. The metal skulls gleamed behind him, a chorus of angels around his head.
“I didn’t expect this from you, Bari. This is a devastating betrayal.”
“It’s just so I could remember everything.”
It sounded so wimpy. He was reaching for one of the metal skulls in the archway, and it slid straight out of the wall with his touch. He placed my recorder on the ground and smashed it into fragments, using the skull as a hammer and coming down in three firm strikes.
“I’ll take the contract, too,” he said. I watched as he ripped it up and let the debris fall to the floor. “Now, for whatever you were working on. I want to be perfectly clear.”
I leaned away, but he caught my face in his hand. “Nobody is going to believe you. My reputation is spotless. You will never get any of us on the record. You have no evidence.”
“So what now?” I said. “I can’t join anymore? You’re just gonna let me go?”
“Our operation here depends on absolute trust,” he said. “And you’ve breached that.” He walked down the hall, to the elevator, and pressed the glass button to call it. “You may go now,” he said.
“I’m really sorry,” I said. “I loved it here.”
“Then why would you do this?”
I paused to consider the question. “I don’t know,” I said. “I guess I was ready to die, but not to lose control.”
The elevator doors closed, and I was sealed into my own company. By the time I got to the lobby I felt more adrift than I had in my whole life. I hadn’t realized how badly I’d wanted to belong to something. I walked out and downtown. The bridge was so tall. I got the feeling that Tom once described, of the majesty of a structure, the whole thing engulfing me. Looking at it, it hit me for the first time that humans had made this thing—had cracked the laws of physics and beat them back together with their own two hands, and every day thousands of people trusted that they got it right. That was something. A bridge was a useful way to spend a life.