"The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2005"

[fiefoe]

"Five Forgotten Instincts" / Dan Chaon

__ I have thought about trying to learn Spanish, but I actually think that if I could speak their language they wouldn't like me as much anymore.

** "My Little Brother Ruined My Life" / Stephen Elliott

• Jackets are piled on the bed in the bedroom and people are lying on them or on the floor telling stories about losing their virginity. Everybody has an MFA so every story has a small inappropriate observation. "He put his hand between my legs at the movie theater. I was wearing my mother's skirt."
• "Why'd you break up with her?" Bosco asks. "She's the whole package." He sounds like my father. My father always spoke of women as if they were frozen meat.
  
• We meet the girls at the station and I find myself wanting to impress them, but I cant. Young girls talk a lot, act dramatic, dance around, and sing inside trains. I feel so old.
  
• I tell him he can't have a beer if more than half the people in attendance say it's OK. "This is democracy," I say. He's too shy to ask.
  

"The Lost Boys" / Jeff Gordinier

• Lately, officials across the Southwest have figured out that young girls arerit the only ones who get a raw deal from the practice of plural marriage. It's simple math. If you've got a closed community with equal numbers of boys and girls, and you've got older men who want to marry twenty of the girls, you're going to have a population imbalance. Warren Jeffs apparently found a solution: shear off some of the boys.
• In one, a civil case that's based on the RICO Act and the same brand of racketeering charges you might throw at the Mafia, six of the Lost Boys are claiming that the prophet and his inner circle systematically conspired to lock them out of jobs, school, and family relationships - pretty much everything a free society would allow.
• It's a smell, with a fermented sweetness verging on rot, that is unique to the natural habitat of young men living in close quarters, and which seems to be a source of pleasure only to the flies darting from one end of the room to the other.
  

"Roadkill" / Kate Krautkramer

__ The packing process was cold and clean; the fish were firm and silver. I expected to be horrified at the sheer volume of life being raked from the ocean. In one small packing plant with a crew of thirty people, we processed 20,000 pounds of salmon every hour. But instinct betrayed me. A false, quiet sense of abundance prevailed.

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