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

Trincomalee

On my last night in Trincomalee I couldn’t sleep. I lay frozen on the hard single bed, wide-awake and petrified. There I was, a foreign woman, alone in a glass-fronted room on the ground floor of a half-empty beach hotel on the war-ravaged coast of Sri Lanka. But was I really alone? I could feel the presence of other humans but I couldn’t hear anyone. Yet, I could almost smell them. It was unbearable. I just had to look outside. I put on my glasses, crept silently to the window and slowly drew open the flimsy cotton curtain a pinch.

Montrealer Mariam Pal’s memoir, Ballet is not for Muslim Girls, will be published this year by Renaissance Press. Find Mariam on Twitter @mariampmontrea1.

Spooked

A Toronto Ghost