Bri Coffin’s surreal story “The Flesh Bank” has been selected the winner of Dos Pueblos Writing Center’s 10th annual write-a-thon competition.

The writing center at Dos Pueblos High School is a small group of students and teacher advisors who provide writing assistance to other students.

The writing center also promotes creative writers by hosting an annual write-a-thon in which all DP students are invited to participate.

The competition consists of randomly choosing three themes out of 20 that the organizers came up with before the event. The themes chosen this year were Bank, Time Heals, and Nothing Lasts Forever.

The competitors had 90 minutes to complete their stories.

Following the write-a-thon, students were invited to come to the library and vote on their favorite piece. After a week of voting, Coffin’s story was named the winner.

Following is “The Flesh Bank” by Bri Coffin

“Ten thousand dollars.

On December 23, 1999, Alexander Gravel sold off his kidney. The process was simpler than he thought, really, and the government paid more than fairly.

The thought had occurred to everyone, at some point in their lives, that they should donate an organ. Old men who lost their jobs, dads whose wives were having twins.

With the invention of national flesh banks, donating your body was just as financially incentivized as marrying off, flying out to middle Wisconsin and having a child. Except this time, it was from the comfort of your own, little, two-room apartment in Vegas that was shared with three other tenants.

Alex had heard of smaller operations, of course, working on building their own flesh constructs. For a moment, he considered selling off his pancreas to one of them, until it ran on a government site for nearly twenty grand. 

The inbox of his computer beeped from the nightstand, a soft, white glow pouring over the littered room. Alexander kept as still as possible in bed, praying away the assaulting light, reaching across his sheets until his hand landed on the plastic, government sanctioned bottle of 600 milligram ibuprofen.

The hand made its slow motion back up his body, the cap already discarded from the first use, two weeks ago. If he rolled over on his bed, the pills that already shook out from the bottle seemed to manifest underneath him, drawn to whatever little mass he possessed in such a pick-pocked body.

He swallowed the last six that remained in the bottle, like little roaches, clinging to the lining of his throat.

The white light shifted, flashing, neon colors. It was, he thought, another annoying pop-up ad displaying full body donation! In bouncing rainbow text. The thought occurred to him, then, that rent was due in a week.

If he could reach the booklet on his nightstand, he could check the going rate of the market. If he really went all out, he could sell his heart and stomach, and have enough left over after rent to pay for replacements, leftovers that stopped functioning from one of the old flesh constructs.

But, he thinks, he could also lay down in bed. The other arm’s finger rested over the face of a phone screen. And he could log onto the government website and take whatever bid they gave him for a full body. That way, he could lay in bed for another two weeks, and his roommates could drag his body out and collect the money.

Two hundred thousand? That seemed about right.”