Flowers for Algernon

by Daniel Keyes

After the operashun Im gonna try to be smart. Im gonna try awful hard.

I think Ill be frends with Algernon.

They weren’t laughing. They knew what was happening to me. I had reached a new level, and anger and suspicion were my first reactions to the world around me.

If they gave him enough time—if they didn’t rush him or push him too fast—he would get it. But nobody has time.

I shouldn’t have stayed, but it’s hard to break the habit of listening because people have always spoken and acted as if I weren’t there, as if they never cared what I overheard.

“But I’m not an inanimate object,” I argued. “I’m a person.” He looked confused for a moment and then laughed. “Of course, Charlie. But I wasn’t referring to now. I meant before the operation.” Smug, pompous—I felt like hitting him too. “I was a person before the operation. In case you forgot—”

I see now that when Norma flowered in our garden I became a weed, allowed to exist only where I would not be seen, in corners and dark places.

I’m an individual now, and so was Charlie before he ever walked into that lab.

But I know now there’s one thing you’ve all overlooked: intelligence and education that hasn’t been tempered by human affection isn’t worth a damn.”

Intelligence without the ability to give and receive affection leads to mental and moral breakdown, to neurosis, and possibly even psychosis. And I say that the mind absorbed in and involved in itself as a self-centered end, to the exclusion of human relationships, can only lead to violence and pain.

I put Algernon’s body into a small metal container and took him home with me. I wasn’t going to let them dump him into the incinerator. It’s foolish and sentimental, but late last night I buried him in the back yard. I wept as I put a bunch of wild flowers on the grave.

Charlie doesn’t want to know what lies beyond. Does he fear seeing God? Or seeing nothing?

P.S. please if you get a chanse put some flowrs on Algernons grave in the bak yard.