This piece is excerpted from On Call: A Doctor’s Journey in Public Service by Dr. Anthony Fauci, a guest at Amherst College’s LitFest 2025. Register for this exciting, 10th-anniversary celebration of Amherst’s literary legacy and life.
By DAN HECK
It’s sometime in 2007. I’m almost 21. At night I stock bulk items in the backroom of a Target. Dante helped me get the job. My best friend since eighth grade: the human bully-repellent with rockstar swagger and long, luscious hair. Target’s pay sucks, and I hate work, but it’s something I can do with Dante.
Most nights, we unload the truck’s thousand or more items together. The two of us in a tight, hot, truck container, tearing down walls of packaged toys, clothes, food, and cleaning supplies. One time, the wall of goods is packed extra tight. It’s probably 120 degrees in the container and managers demand we keep the unload moving. I’m too precious with the cargo, so nothing moves and heat exhaustion creeps in. Eyesight blurs. Standing dizzies. I’m a couple sweats away from passing out. I get a cold Gatorade and a five-minute break, but only if I finish the unload. A manager threatens to steal both away.
By GRZEGORZ KASDEPKE
Translated from Polish by JONATHAN BAINES
Piece appears below in English and the original Polish.
Translator’s Note
The memoir-plus-bonus-recipe ‘Grey Dumplings’ by Grzegorz Kasdepke is taken from the volume Królik po islandzku (2022). When it appears in English, I hope it’ll have the title Icelandic Rabbit. It’s a collaboration with the novelist Hubert Klimko-Dobrzaniecki. The two authors take it in turns to share a snapshot from their lives, each with a relevant recipe tacked on the end. The stories are accompanied by Aleksandra Cieślak’s striking illustrations. (Ask your search engine to show you the cover!) The short prose pieces are unfailingly comic, but there’s always something more serious going on as well. There are thirty vignettes – and thirty recipes – in total and an atmosphere of friendly competition as they stack up. Cumulatively, they paint a vivid picture of Polish life over the last several decades. ‘Grey Dumplings’ is the first of Kasdepke’s contributions. I was drawn to it by the same qualities that illuminate his writing for children: a lightly-worn irony and an exhilarating curiosity about the world.
— Jonathan Baines
Grey Dumplings
The smaller the flat, the more friction – literally and figuratively – between family members.
My parents lived in a small room in my grandparents’ flat. They were very young (as a child, of course, I didn’t appreciate that, but it’s clear to me now – and perhaps my father’s mustache did seem a little thin). It was supposed to be a temporary arrangement, just until they were assigned their own three-bedroom flat on the Dziesięciny estate in Białystok. It went on for ten years. Goethe would have seen the beauty in this, at least from my childish point-of-view. One two-roomed flat and three generations: that’s the real magic of numbers, don’t you think?
My Grandma Betty’s garage, like the rest of her house, was always neat and well-labeled. The tools hung in their places. The floor was swept clean. Along the walls, DIY wood shelving was stacked high with boxes labeled according to their contents. Herb Toys. Xmas Decorations.
Somewhere amidst all the old slot cars and yearbooks, up by the rafters in a far corner, were three produce boxes filled with ephemera from her childhood in Toledo: a trophy from the Maumee River Yacht Club, a 1911 desk calendar printed by her adoptive father’s plumbing and heating company—“We’d like to be your plumbers just the same as Dr. Jones or Dr. Brown is your doctor”—get-well cards, bank books, newspaper clippings.
By LAURA MARRIS
Somewhere in those years of 6 a.m. flights, I developed a recurring dream of a place I knew in the northwesternmost corner of Connecticut, where stone walls snaked among the trees of a forest that had once been farmland. The kind of town where the post office is also home to two chipmunks, one messy and one clean. A place full of wild birds, the flocks of my earliest childhood, vortexes of robins where rural woods broke open into fields. Where I had dug in the streambed and drunk the shimmer of mica with the silt. Where old traces of human mining and clear-cutting had been softened by an enveloping abundance. I felt myself wanting to check on it, wondering how it was doing.
By ALI SHAPIRO
Lightning Talk on I-90 by Ali Shapiro
Ali Shapiro’s work has appeared in Gertrude, Popula, PrairieS
Most of our old family photos are from the beach, and most of them are of my father. In them, he is always grinning, gleaming from the Hawaiian Tropic suntan oil that scented the denim shirt he wore every summer. My mother loved the beach, too, but did not like to be photographed. In all those years, Dad caught Mom on camera only once, on a boogie board riding a wave, still wearing the sunglasses that stayed on her head all summer, even after dark. She preferred to float, read, and take pictures of my brothers and me. Blindingly pale or perilously pink, like “before” ads for skin cancer, we’re inevitably chewing or punching or blinking, ruining the picture. My father, however, always looks perfect, natural, exactly where he’s supposed to be. His hands are on his hips, superhero-style, as if he’s won some high-stakes game and the beach now belongs to him.
By ED YONG
This piece originally appeared in The Atlantic. Journalist Ed Yong will be a guest at Amherst College’s LitFest 2024. Register for this exciting celebration of Amherst’s literary legacy and life.
Alexis Misko’s health has improved enough that, once a month, she can leave her house for a few hours. First, she needs to build up her energy by lying in a dark room for the better part of two days, doing little more than listening to audiobooks. Then she needs a driver, a quiet destination where she can lie down, and days of rest to recover afterward. The brief outdoor joy “never quite feels like enough,” she told me, but it’s so much more than what she managed in her first year of long COVID, when she couldn’t sit upright for more than an hour or stand for more than 10 minutes. Now, at least, she can watch TV on the same day she takes a shower.
This feature is part of our print and online portfolio of writing from the immigrant farmworker community. Read more online or in Issue 26.
1.
A moaning by the labor camp dump caught my attention. Inside a junked car with no doors, our neighbor, Diana, was hugging and kissing a big boy not quite a man. I never knew his name, so I call him Novio—boyfriend. In the tangle of arms and hands, her white, ruffled dress slid off her shoulder. From a near distance, her husband, Rogelio, in full Sunday clothes right up to his Panama hat, made a beeline toward the car, his hands in fists.
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Celebrating 15 Years