Flowers for Algernon

by Daniel Keyes

he kept telling me to rilax and that gets me skared because it always means its gonna hert.

If the operashun werks good Ill show that mouse I can be as smart as he is even smarter. Then Ill be abel to reed better and spell the werds good and know lots of things and be like other pepul. Boy that woud serprise everyone. If the operashun werks and I get smart mabye Ill be abel to find my mom and dad and sister and show them. Boy woud they be serprised to see me smart just like them and my sister.

just want to be smart like other pepul so I can have lots of frends who like me.

If your smart you can have lots of frends to talk to and you never get lonley by yourself all the time.

Joe Carp said hey look where Charlie had his operashun what did they do Charlie put some brains in. I was going to tell him about me getting smart but I remembered Prof Nemur said no. Then Frank Reilly said what did you do Charlie open a door the hard way. That made me laff. Their my frends and they really like me.

Finished Robinson Crusoe. I want to find out more about what happens to him but Miss Kinnian says thats all there is. WHY.

I find no pleasure in discussing ideas any more on such an elementary level.

but now they were feeling inferior to the moron. I began to see that by my astonishing growth I had made them shrink and emphasized their inadequacies. I had betrayed them, and they hated me for it.

Ironic to find myself on the other side of the intellectual fence.

“No! Only mine! . . . I’m the one who got the A in history—not him! He never gets good marks like me. Why should he help with the dog? And then the dog will like him more than me, and it’ll be his dog instead of mine. No! If I can’t have it for myself I don’t want it.”

Anyone can feel intelligent beside a moron.”

What is my place? Who and what am I now? Am I the sum of my life or only of the past months?

If I could be made into a genius, what about the more than five million mentally retarded in the United States?

Would it be allowed though? Average citizens don’t want mentally disabled people getting smarter than them. I bet it would be used on the upper 1%.

All these months while I’ve been growing up intellectually, I’ve still had the emotional wiring of the childlike Charlie. And every time I came close to you, or thought about making love to you, there was a short circuit.”

I borrowed Burt’s car.

What the hell, he can drive??

would like to help in that area of research, and in the search for radioisotopes that may be used in local cortical control, but I know now that I won’t have the time.

How difficult this must be! To know you are losing your intelligence

I wept as I put a bunch of wild flowers on the grave.

(strange that most of my memories of the street are framed by the window, with me always inside watching the children play).

Whenever Norma would refer to their life together, I’d look to see if Rose was listening, but she was deep in her own world, as if she didn’t understand our language, as if none of it concerned her any more. She drifted around the kitchen like a ghost, picking things up, putting things away, without ever getting in the way. It was frightening.

And I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t remember what I had to say. All missing.

It’s painful to think about that, but what we have, I suspect, is more than most people find in a lifetime.

was like I never had a family til I remembird about them and saw them and now I know I had a family and I was a person just like