Flowers for Algernon

by Daniel Keyes

I dont know what it is or where I got it but he said Algernon had it too. Algernons motor-vation is the chees they put in his box. But it cant be only that because I dint have no chees this week.

If the operashun werks good Ill show that mouse I can be as smart as he is even smarter.

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

I hate that mouse. He always beets me.

I hate the tests and I hate the amazeds and I hate Algernon. I never new before that I was dumber than a mouse.

but is it better now that you know?

The more intelligent you become the more problems you’ll have, Charlie.

I never before heard anyone say that there might not be a God. That frightened me, because for the first time I began to think about what God means.

I spend most of my free time at the library now, reading and soaking up what I can from books. I’m not concentrating on anything in particular, just reading a lot of fiction now—Dostoevski, Flaubert, Dickens, Hemingway, Faulkner—everything I can get my hands on—feeding a hunger that can’t be satisfied.

This intelligence has driven a wedge between me and all the people I knew and loved,

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.

And then, as I know I am about to pierce the crust of existence, like a flying fish leaping out of the sea, I feel the pull from below.

I am afraid. Not of life, or death, or nothingness, but of wasting it as if I had never been.

I’ve told myself I won’t have dinner until I sit down and write something—anything.

but what we have, I suspect, is more than most people find in a lifetime.

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