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

My Marriage

We missed the 2008 window when LGBTQ couples could marry; it quickly closed. Now my partner lay in a bed at Mission Hospital, in a coma from a ruptured brain aneurysm. Should I stay or leave? What would be the cost? Her sister arrived. Demanded doctors unplug her sister from all machines. With our Registered Domestic Partnership document in hand, I made the decisions with the nurses and doctors, not her sister. Fourteen years, eight hundred thousand dollars, and a multitude of therapies later, my partner made it. We got married. My wife, my soulmate, until death do we part.

Susan Davis is a retired English teacher and taught over three thousand students. She took the time to earn three masters degrees in creative writing.


A Dead Bully

Do It Yourself