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

Quarantine D&D

I, Lekeila, run to dampen the flames as our spaceship hurtles toward the surface of the moon. Our dungeon master announces that we have less than two minutes until catastrophic impact ends the game. From one corner of my screen, Bakar leans forward. Concentrates. Rolls. Frowns. His roll has failed. Eugenia screams into my earpiece. Pellegrin steps up. Concentrates. Rolls. We wait, faces close to the screen. One, two ... a loud whoop and Pellegrin's hands clap together. Success! We all cheer. Pellegrin turns into a giant falcon and carries our ship to the surface, seconds from obliteration. We are saved.

Misti Duvall is a writer and legal writing teacher in New York City, where she writes fiction, sometimes essays, and the occasional weird poem.

Role Reversal

Summer