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

New Rug

She won’t shut up about her new rug. She found it on Instagram. I look it up later and realize she must have spent a fortune, but while we’re there I assume she got it on Amazon. It’s real wool, she keeps saying. Ours always off-gasses, we leave a window open. Someone breaks a glass and she doesn’t bat an eye, her cabinets are enormous. She pulls down another delicately stemmed wine glass, the belly bulbous in her manicured hand. My husband laughs on the train ride home: That thing will be shedding for years. I nearly quake with jealousy.

Julia Kenny's fiction has been published in The Greensboro Review and Okay Donkey. She works in publishing and lives in NYC with her family. Twitter: @juliafkenny.

A Victim Speaks

Touch of Love