By Dustin Faulstick

They had been together ten years when they decided to get on the registry. They had been to a wedding over Labor Day weekend and realized that all of their stuff was shit. They decided, as anyone would, that they might as well collect what they deserved. It started as an adventure. One of them wanted a knife holder. One of them wanted a blender. They had always both wanted a cast-iron skillet. It went on like this until one of them wanted a kitchen organizer. We don’t need a kitchen organizer; we’re not toddlers, one of them said. That one removed the kitchen organizer from the registry. The other one removed the down comforter from the registry: it was a tit-for-tat. It went on like this. Occasionally an item was added, but mostly items were removed: the electric drill; the waffle maker; the geometric-patterned area rug, one of those coffee cups that keeps itself warm. Once there was nothing in the registry, they started in on the stuff they already owned: a broken-down bicycle, a Don Quixote-themed fork-and-spoon wall decoration, a plastic Adirondack chair held together by duct tape. This, too, became a      tit-for-tat: an Ikea shelf from one of their sister’s college dormitories, license plates from the states where they used to live, their hospice plants on life support. It went on like this until there was nothing left. 

---

Dustin Faulstick teaches in the Lewis Honors College at the University of Kentucky. His work has appeared in the essay collection Wharton, Hemingway, and the Advent of Modernism, and in the journals Studies in American Naturalism, Literature and Belief, and Religion and the Arts. He is writing a book on Ecclesiastes and early-twentieth-century US literature.