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

To Die Young

TW: Violence.

Like Tina. Not cancer, stroke, car accident. Not quietly at ninety, a few mourners, a cleric using dismal platitudes. But disastrously. Throngs crammed into pews. Eloquent minister, musicians, vivid eulogies, so many tears. This wasn’t a garden-variety memorial that I wouldn’t recall next year. Tina Anderson, when/ how did she die? She’d forever be remembered not for her paintings of nude men, or vegan barbeques. But for how she died. None will think of Tina without picturing her son, Trevor, upstate, sealed in prison for the criminally insane and wondering if he’d finally remembered emptying that pistol into her chest. 

Andrea Marcusa’s work has appeared in Gettysburg Review, Cutbank, River Teeth, Citron Review, and others. Find Andrea at andreamarcusa.com and on Twitter @d_marcusa.

Honeybadger

Tiger Park