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

Traveling Blues

The familiar sound of windblown, dry leaves scratching against concrete demanded attention on that dark morning – the unintended confluence of God and Man’s best intentions. Every movement impulse sent from brain to body was measured, defensive.  Being awake and outside at that hour had cracked the shell of security formed by months of carefully-monitored routine. Several thousand miles and several hundred thousand aimless, self-propelled thoughts later, he remained equally hopeless — skating across a layer of mud which hid the dry and sandy ground. Odors alternated between the pungent and the fragrant in the Arizona desert, after the rain. 

David Gauthier has been getting serious about his writing for about 30 years now. He spends most of his time in his Salem, Massachusetts backyard, musing.

Fight Evil

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