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

Then

Remember when our dreams were simply slips of paper, scrawled in minutes, torn with careless confidence, and tacked to beams that crossed through darkness overhead in the attic above your room? We’d climb the closet—shimmying up shelves, pushing aside the plywood panel—in the day, wanting night, we’d pull ourselves into shadows and then, cloaked in dust and girlhood secrets, sit in circles of candlelight, surrounded by spiderwebs and pretty pink fiberglass, surrounded by so many possible futures, and they were all possible then—at eleven—when everything is, before we know better, but maybe we knew better then.

Elizabeth Maria Naranjo is a writer in Tempe, Arizona. Her work has appeared in Brevity Magazine, Superstition Review, Hunger Mountain, and a few other places. Find Elizabeth at elizabethmarianaranjo.com and on Twitter @emarianaranjo.

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The Memory Rose