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

Leather

We stopped at an ATM. I waited in the car while he shed his long leather coat and left it on the hood. Suddenly, a hand snatched it! An engine screeched! The coat gone! He slammed from the glassed-in ATM and tossed himself on the thief's hood. Off they went down the road! Tremendous cursing! I walked to the lot's edge. He hung on, punched and punched the windshield until it cracked under his ring-bedecked fingers. After a nerve-wracking moment, he jounced jollily down the sidewalk, grinning, wearing his leather jacket. The thieves had tossed it from the passenger-side window.

Mary Ann Honaker is the author of Becoming Persephone (Third Lung Press, 2019). She currently lives in Beaver, West Virginia. Find Mary Ann online at maryannhonaker.wordpress.com.

First Lift

Joseph Heller