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

Mother Nature

We awaken to a deafening roar. The floor thrusts towards the ceiling. Walls splinter and pieces of plaster crumble around us. My husband anchors my body to his. Anchors us to a bed that’s bouncing to a violent beat. He shouts, “Everything is going to be okay.” But his voice is a whisper in my ear because Oh my God, we’re going to die is thundering in my head. The house is cracking, groaning, slamming, shaking. I am sure it’s going to implode and swallow us up in a heap of sheetrock and brick. Swallow us into the angry Earth.

Karen Crawford’s work has been published in Flash Boulevard, Reflex Fiction, The Ekphrastic Review, Six Sentences, and Versification, among others. Find her on Twitter @KarenCrawford_.

A Thousand Words

Womb