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 Hardest Thing

The four of us sat together on the bed he and I had shared, where we woke to classical music, where he brought me coffee, where their bright faces greeted us in the morning; the bed where I nursed them as infants, where we cuddled on those bright, happy mornings. Now it was evening and the shadows lengthened, telling of darkness to come. It must have been September. I had hoped for something different, a last minute reprieve, a path away from the edge. But now the time had come to do the hardest thing. We would tell them together.

Pat Yingling is a writer, former teacher, and mother writing a book on abortion.

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