One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

by Ken Kesey

“You seem to forget, Miss Flinn, that this is an institution for the insane.”

a twisted sinewy dwarf the color of cold asphalt. His mother was raped in Georgia while his papa stood by tied to the hot iron stove with plow traces, blood streaming into his shoes. The boy watched from a closet five years old and squinting his eye to peep out the crack between the door and the jamb, and he never grew an inch after.

Her uniform, even after she’s been here half a day, is still starched so stiff it don’t exactly bend any place; it cracks sharp at the joints with a sound like a frozen canvas being folded.

society is what decides who’s sane and who isn’t, so you got to measure up.

“You won’t be going anyplace for a while.” One Christmas at midnight on the button, at the old place, the ward door blows open with a crash, in comes a fat man with a beard, eyes ringed red by the cold and his nose just the color of a cherry. The black boys get him cornered in the hall with flashlights. I see he’s all tangled in the tinsel Public Relation has been stringing all over the place, and he’s stumbling around in it in the dark. He’s shading his red eyes from the flashlights and sucking on his mustache. “Ho ho ho,” he says. “I’d like to stay but I must be hurrying along. Very tight schedule, ya know. Ho ho. Must be going. . . .” The black boys move in with the flashlights. They kept him with us six years before they discharged him, clean-shaven and skinny as a pole.