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

The Check-In

It’s almost midnight when they knock on the window of my basement apartment and ask me to come to the back door, and I do. I clutch the door frame and face their bulletproof vests, armored in my thinnest nightgown. Vest One says they’ve received a call from my family, and my breath vanishes, air imprisoned between the stitches of embroidered police badges. Vest Two says they’re concerned, checking in, and my eyes are seized by holsters, guns. Vest Two says they’ve come for suicide prevention, and I struggle to say, “No officer, I haven’t lost my will to live.”

Janice Vis is a creative writer, teaching assistant, and Ph.D. Candidate at McMaster University. She has several publications in literary and scholarly periodicals. Find Janice online at janicevis.wordpress.com and on Twitter @_janiceleaine.

Tethered Corn

Nonstarter