Patient – Michigan Quarterly Review

Patient

I was sick of language so I started collecting rocks. Each time I had a thought I’d throw a rock into a lake.

The people in town couldn’t get it. They tried very hard. They thought maybe I’d lost the ability to speak, so they started writing me letters in a show of solidarity. When they placed a full envelope next to me, I put a rock on top of it. They thought I was holding down language in case of a great wind. We’re inside, they’d remind me. And I’d place a rock on their heads. 

Unsure what to do, they all learned sign language. This moved me so much, I rolled a boulder into a lake. It took all day. 

There were always hard hands in my face. The more desperate they grew, the wilder their arms flailed. They looked like windmills. When I caught an open palm, I put a rock in it. 

The townspeople became more serious. They held council meetings twice a week to get me back to language. At first, they focused on the why. They went to every nearby hospital trying to find my medical records. But there were attendants at each entrance whose job it was to bash in the skulls of anyone who came looking for answers. On their corpses, I placed the prettiest rocks I could find.

The townspeople wept into a lake at all the casualties. They no longer cared about the why, which I would have told them to not care about in the first place if I had had the right rock. They decided to go after my supply. In shifts, volunteers swept the town until they’d collected every rock they could find. 

They presented the mound of rocks to me closed off by barbed wire. What do you have to say to that? I opened my mouth and pulled out a rock.

They realized they were working against something supernatural. They took down the barbed wire and planted flowers all around the rocks and dug a path to the middle of the pile where they made a crater filled with an array of cushions and cookies and candles.

Go ahead, sit in your rocks, they said gently. We’ll keep watch. And so I walked to the cushy place and took a nap and when I woke up I collected the best rocks I could find and spelled out I-l-o-v-e-y-o-u.

It says I love you, I told them.


Why I Chose It: Michigan Quarterly Review reader Jamie McCarthy on why she recommended “Patient” by Olivia Muenz for the SomaFlights issue. You can purchase the issue here.

In earlier iterations of this introduction, I opened with a long, drawn-out analogy: a great flash
fiction work is like a cairn, because its few words are chosen with care and, like stones, those
words rely on each other to stand as one composition. A fair enough claim, I suppose, but
somewhat pedantic. I stuck with the comparison, though, until it became clear I’d missed the
point entirely. The point being this: great flash knows itself. It’s gracious, disciplined, and
resourceful. It is what Olivia Muenz’s mesmerizing story shows us it is—patient.


“I was sick of language,” the unnamed narrator tells us in the beginning, “so I started
collecting rocks.” The syntax and diction are simple, but the line introduces to the complexity we
will encounter throughout the text. Immediately we find that we have our own role in the
narrative tension, occupying a space between the narrator’s self-awareness and the
townspeople’s bewilderment. We stand by the townspeople as they offer touching acts of support
and, later, startling moments of violence, at the same time as we move alongside the narrator,
placing rocks in hands and on heads in response. In this liminal space, we see that each stone
carries a careful message—that the narrator’s sentiments, though wordless, are apparent. Still, we
can identify with the community’s struggle to navigate such a vast communication gap between
themselves and one of their own.


At the story’s climax, we are caught in the middle of a standoff between the townspeople,
who have confiscated all the stones in the area, and the narrator. “What do you have to say to
that?” the townspeople ask. As the narrator opens their mouth, we can almost feel the rocks
coming up from our own throats. The supernatural becomes natural. For a story to transcend
corporeal boundaries is rare. With so few words, by the end of the story, “Patient” connects the
spaces we each occupy into one in which we all can thrive. That space is love; that space is
patience.


You can purchase the Spring 2023 issue here.

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