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

Initiations

The first live show I ever saw was the comedy duo Cheech & Chong at Toronto’s Massey Hall, circa 1974. My buddy Frank D’Lazzaro’s older brother Ricky scored the highly coveted tickets from his biker drug dealer. As I recall, I’d never laughed so hard in my life. Mind you, Ricky got us so high on elephant weed almost everything was funny. Not so funny was the long-haired dude seated in front of us who accidentally snorted two-hundred-dollars’ worth of angel dust. Someone foaming at the mouth from an overdose and being stretchered off was also a first for me.

Salvatore Difalco lives in Toronto, Canada. His short stories have appeared in a number of journals.


Cooking and Memory

Squashed