Five Minutes explores five minutes of a life in one hundred words. Five minutes is edited by Susanna Baird, with editorial support from managing editor Maria s. picone, newsletter editor kate meen, and founding reader bobbi lerman, plus our rotating team of guest readers, who you can meet in the latest newsletteR. Five Minutes was founded in October 2020, with the Salem (Mass.)-based writing group Carrot Cake Writers supplying the journal’s first pieces. We’d love to read your five. Submit here

Cherry Truck

I was driving across country with my kids, hoping to see our friend before she went into surgery for cancer. Katie said it felt like there was someone sitting between her and Brian in the back. I said it was probably my mother, whose spirit had been with us before, and kept driving. Trevor, riding shotgun, threw my tape out the window, then my purse, no explanation. I had to pull over. Back on the road, the cherry truck that had passed while I retrieved my purse was on its side on a curve, where we would have been flattened.

Sheri McGuinn writes. School plays, short stories, news articles, college papers, investigative court reports, education plans, screenplays, novels, non-fiction — it's all writing, and she writes.

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