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 and founding reader bobbi lerman; March READERS isabelle B.L, Sara Bednark, Amanda Callais, Ian Li, Nia Mahmud, April Mccloud, Nina Miller, and Clorissa Phillips; and March Editorial intern Kate meen. 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. 

Even Here

Casey Walsh

I didn’t want to see you. But I saw you in the crowd at the Edinburgh pub, whooping it up over World Cup football. I saw you in the freckle-faced toddler squealing in delight and the 12-year-old boy teasing his siblings at the beach and the young man with his parents in a New Orleans cafe. You were the newlywed gazing adoringly at his wife. Tonight, there you are in the middle-aged son holding his mother’s hand as she lay, gravely ill, in the bed next to mine. I wanted to forget, but even here, you sit beside me, too.

Casey Mulligan Walsh’s writing appears in numerous outlets. Her memoir “The Full Catastrophe” (Motina Books 2025) explores the search for meaning after repeated loss. www.caseymulliganwalsh.com Facebook: caseymulliganwalshwriter Twitter: @CMulliganWalsh Instagram: @caseymulliganwalsh


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