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

Liquor Stop

I look down the shelves, all the same shade of brown, warm in the sunlight, potentially perilous. I can’t keep focus. I keep breaking up. I choose rye, it seems dignified and things are awfully broken. I wonder if the checkout woman can see that I am awfully broken. I wonder what the love I had would say, watching me play a role I hate. I imagine the bottle breaking. The silence of my life since we broke up. A bell rings as I swing open the door. I got what I was looking for.

Hannah Shields lives in Brooklyn and is a bartender.

The Interview

Out in the Wild