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

Like a Stone

I’m in the ER with a kidney stone. There’s an IV for the pain. The young doctor comes and goes. (I am young, too. Twenty-six.) He leaves the clipboard with his notes, which I skim. It’s about me, so I feel it’s OK to read this sort-of-shared diary. A sentence leaps out. “Patient is stoic.” My boss had had to beg me to go to the hospital. Once, as a freshman, I’d broken down while presenting a paper on Holocaust poetry. My tears were horrifying; we rarely cried in my family. Stoic: Finally I had a diagnosis for my condition.

Lynn Mundell is the author of the flash collection Let Our Bodies Be Returned to Us (Yemessee). Find Lynn at lynnmundell.com, on Twitter @lynnfmundell and on Instagram @mundelllynn.

Lost in Prayer

Troubadour