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 Visit

I wait, masked as they wheel her out. Six feet away, also masked, a shrunken white thing. In clothes I've never seen before. I tell her my name. She repeats it, as a question. She had a stroke, they said. Maybe more than one. I tell her all my news, to fill up the twenty minutes allowed. I say other names: her sister still living, her husband long dead. No response. Then our eyes meet. No one else has my mom's eyes. So cold, so savage. They say: Who is this person? I'm thinking the same thing. That hasn't changed.

Ian is a self-employed engineer who writes for the fun of it, mostly about self-propelled travel and Vikings. His first book, called "Riding the Big One," has both.

Fate

Nixon