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

Chikan

The man’s fingers dug into the fist I formed around his shirt collar. Everyone remembers the first time they heard a man beg. “Let go,” he said. I shook my head. In one of my ears a forgotten earphone played forgotten music. He pulled hard and I pulled harder. I saw our audience gathering closer around us on the train platform: concerned-looking men in their business suits, the approaching pair of police, the frightened girl he touched. I saw her frantic face. I told him just three words. Three words that made him as still as glass. “I saw you.”

J.R. Gaskin is a failed anthropologist who writes short fiction and haiku from his tiny family home in Fukushima, Japan. Find J.R. on Twitter @ItsJamesRG.

*In Japan a “chikan” is a person, usually a man, who rubs against or gropes others, usually women, in crowds, often in trains. 

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