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

Dress Blues

I bend over, picking up socks, books, a school pencil. I’ll do laundry, check email, maybe start on dinner. The next thing and the next thing and the next thing to get through the day. Looking straight ahead and not too far back or too far forward – my strategy for dealing with the new normal. I straighten up, and the gut punch comes swiftly and unexpectedly. Hanging there, the blue dress she picked out herself, the one she didn’t get to wear to the sixth-grade dance, stolen by a virus. I wait until I’m in the shower to cry.

Kelley Dinkelmeyer is a university instructor and a mom just trying to get her family through covid intact.

See You Soon

Jay