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

Wrapping Paper

You lift a fold of wrapping paper, winter blue with curls of silver, peeling back the foil with more care than it deserves. This has not changed, your reluctance to crush something beautiful. You’re fourteen now and have chosen your own gifts; there is little here to surprise you. Yet this might: the light-up bubble wand I saw you covet for a moment at Disneyland. Your eyes maintain their ever-steady calm, but I know your heart. Still, I’m apprehensive as you set aside the neatly folded square of paper and open the box. And then your eyes are a child’s again.

Elizabeth Maria Naranjo is a writer in Tempe, Arizona. Her work has appeared in Brevity, Superstition Review, Reservoir Road Literary Review, and a few other places. Elizabethmarianaranjo.com Twitter @emarianaranjo 

Heliotrope

Growing Out