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

Moses

The sun is high and hot. The nettles and overgrowth scratch our ankles. We three siblings, on a long-awaited pilgrimage, walk up and down aisles and aisles of gravestones, some modern and readable, some old and fallen. We search for Moses, a distant relative who was a klezmer musician who migrated to Vienna. We have an old black-and-white photo of relatives, all wearing hats, surrounding the gravestone. Suddenly, “I found it!” And there, leaning over and barely legible, we found him. We surround the grave, with our hats on, honoring our past, and take our own photo.

Andrea Eisenberg is an obstetrician-gynecologist who enjoys non-fiction writing.

Sans Churro

The Park