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

Homemade Raft

It has been pouring for three days and it continues to rain, relentlessly and heavily. The paddy field outside our house window has lost its boundaries. Water floods into our kitchen, carrying with it the lost things buried in the backyard, some unidentifiable smelly fish, and miraculously, three sturdy, large banana trees, uprooted but intact. My brother and our cousin, lacking things to do, craft a solid raft from the fallen trunks. Everyone gets in and paddles through the transformed village. For the first time, we feel taller than our feet. For the first time, we wish for more rain.

Tiara Ulfah is an Indonesian student living in Germany. medium.com/@akuntiara5 

Echo Park