Quick reads you can finish in 10-30 minutes
Found 388 short novels in Face-Slapping
I was twelve when the world I trusted split along a seam I never saw. "My daughter will live with me," I said in the courtroom, and I meant it as a promise to my mother. I meant it as a shield. "I understand," my father murmured, mouth dry, while the judge looked through us like we were weather. The room smelled of paper and stale perfume. My mother, Mary Gross, sat like a mute monument, pale and fragile as a pressed flower. Fernanda Dunn, my aunt, sat across with Polina Johnston—a child...
I came home because he said, "Wait until I'm back, we'll get married." I came home because I believed him. I am Susana Sullivan. I studied like my life depended on it. I turned five years of work into three. I came back early to give Marcel Xu a surprise. Instead I found a woman who looked like me standing by his side. "She looks like you," someone said to me at the charity auction. "Not quite," I answered, but I did not mean it as comfort. "Susana!" Marcel's voice cut through...
"I stole his phone and found a call labeled 'Raquel.'" I remember how my hands shook when I saw the name flash on Apollo's screen. I remember the rush of anger and something colder under it: the feeling that I was finally done pretending. "Who is Raquel?" I asked Apollo that night, holding his phone like evidence. He didn't look at me. He looked at the living room floor and answered, "A long story." Then he walked away. He had been walking away from me for four years. "You think...
“I hurt him.” I said it soft, but the room heard it like a shout. “Cameron, go slow,” Martha said, but I was already at the top of the stairs, barefoot, moving like a ghost to his door. I pushed the door open. Alexander was half-rolled on the bed, his shirt stained with blood and sweat. He was patching himself with strips of cloth. I froze. “You’re bleeding,” I said. He did not move at first. Then he made a small sound, the same low voice I had heard for years, and he said,...
I woke to the taste of smoke and iron in my mouth, and the dark smelled like someone else's breath. "Stay still," a voice said, low and careless. "Be useful and be quiet." My fingers remembered the seam of the sheet; my head remembered a thousand hopeful ways to live a different life. My eyes remembered the one reason I had walked into that house trusting it would turn into something else: him. I shut my eyes on the shame. I had been wanting him for more than half my life. "Nicol—" I...
I opened my eyes to bright sky and the sting of pain at the back of my head. "Don't move," a voice hissed somewhere close. My vision swam. I saw a shirtless man fumbling with a button near my chest. Panic filled me like icy water. "What are you doing?" I said, or it came out a ragged sound that might once have been a question. "Making you mine," he said with a grin that tasted like rot. I fought. My hands were clumsy, breath harsh. I kicked at him and hit something that made him...
I woke up knowing three things: I had been given a second chance, my face would not be cut again, and I would not play the spare for Janessa Harvey ever again. "I don't understand," my mother said from the doorway, voice sloped in the same old way. "Why do you want to stay away from home? Why are you so spiteful?" "Because," I said, and the word felt like a small, sharp stone in my mouth, "I want to be Elise Wells. Not her shadow." "Elise," she called me a name she had never used as...
"Get away from the door!" I feel hands on my ribs and I snap awake. "I'm not—" I cough. The room smells of dust and old wood. My head is a thunderhead of memory and pain. My name feels wrong and right. I remember a library, a car, a dark sky—and then I remember none of that matters now. "She's breathing!" someone yells. "Who is she?" a man's voice asks. It's thin and scared. "That's Megan," my mother cries. Her voice is as rough as dry corn. "Megan, open your eyes. Don't you scare...
