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

Fight Evil

For the first few minutes we are together, I in the yellow covid customer circle, he behind the register, we talk about food. He loves the cauliflower pancakes and he hopes I will, too. Then he calls out my shirt, which says “Fight Evil, Read Books.” I could play devil’s advocate about your t-shirt, but I won’t. And he doesn’t. Instead, he pivots to an estate sale he attended, where he scored an original Edgar Allan Poe. He never returns to his objections to my t-shirt. It’s okay, I love his story, probably more than I will love the pancakes.

Susanna Baird loves Trader Joe’s, but has only been once during the pandemic. The cauliflower pancakes are still in her freezer. Website: susannabaird.com Twitter: @SusannaBaird Instagram: @susanna.baird

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Traveling Blues