Quick reads you can finish in 10-30 minutes
Found 388 short novels in Face-Slapping
"Open the door, Madam Cheng! Open up!" I sat bolt upright and stared at the yard outside the thin patched curtain. My throat was dry. My head felt like it had been scrubbed and emptied and then packed with someone else's memory. "Who—?" I croaked. My hand landed on a round, warm belly. It wobbled like a sack of rice. "Oh no," I said. "No. No, no, no." "Who is it?" a woman called from the yard. Her voice was quick with worry. I threw the cloth aside and found a water jar. I...
“Give me your ice cream,” a boy barked, all swagger and lies. “I’m not giving it,” I said, holding my cone like it was a treasure. The cold bit my fingers and the world smelled like sugar and the summer after-school bell. He pushed closer. “Hand it over, little squirt.” I was small then, cheeks full, and I remember thinking his face looked like a statue—sharp nose, thin mouth, too sure of himself. He looked dangerous and honest at the same time. He was Forrest Moreau. He had followers...
"System loaded," the voice said, metallic and calm. "I don't wish to be a footnote," I whispered back to an empty, damp room that smelled of mildew and old metal. "I don't want him to win." A small, folded light unfurled into a creature that looked like a tiny fan-winged serpent. It landed on my shoulder and tapped my collarbone with something like affection. "My name is Belen Corey," it chirped in a tone too bright for the place, "and I'm—your interface." I blinked. "Belen? You...
I woke up coughing. The cough pulled something heavy from my chest and left me gasping like a swimmer who'd just found the surface. "Mom—!" a voice cracked into the room. "Mother!" another voice answered, louder, desperate. I sat up and the world tilted: clay walls, a low roof that smelled of smoke and boiled cabbage, a blanket full of honest patches. Two young men were at my bedside, looking like sons and looking as if the sun had made them honest and hard. One was darker,...
“Give me the wild vegetables and eggs,” Brittany Brooks snapped, and I hugged my basket harder. “I need them for my mother and my brothers,” I said, and felt my voice wobble. “You fox and her brat don’t deserve food,” Brittany said, and grabbed. I ran. She shoved me. I fell. I remember the cliff, the dark, and the cold. Then a white flash and the sound of a phone I’d just bought in my other life humming in my hand. I opened my eyes to a low thatch ceiling, to a woman wiping...
They brought me back because a little corpse had left a throne empty. They thought I would be grateful. They thought I would fit neatly into the role they had carved out. "I am Cataleya Allen," I said the first time I had to answer to a title that had once meant nothing to me. "Not a title," my nurse Janessa Barrett whispered in my ear as I rode into the capital, "a sentence." I laugh now when I remember that—how small the laugh was, how unreliable. The carriage was full of people who...
I woke up to white light and no memory later than a childhood that stopped at ten. The hospital room smelled like disinfectant and boiled rice. My body felt foreign but safe enough. A woman sat in the plastic chair beside me like she had been waiting there forever. "Anna," she said when the nurse told her my name, and she took my hand like the word tied her to me. "Anna, forgive me, I've been so busy. I'm your mother." "Are you my mother?" I asked. I knew the syllables but not the weight...
"I can't lie," I told the room full of microphones. "I have someone I like." "Who is it?" the reporters shouted like a small wave. "It's Evan," I said. "Wait—Evan Williams?" one woman asked, her pen stabbing the air. "Yes," I said. They screamed the rest themselves. The headlines did the work for them. Overnight my name climbed to the top of every trending list. Someone clipped the moment, looped it, and added a chorus of speculations. I sat in my car outside the press center and...
They say some people are written roles they cannot escape. I used to believe that too, because for a long time I thought I was only what others named me: the cold girl, the disappointed heir, the unlovable one. "My name is Emmeline Brady," I say, because names matter and I keep mine like a clean room. There is a boy everyone loves. "Flynn," I would whisper if anyone asked who he was to me. Flynn Mitchell has always been a small sun. He smiled like a weather report promising warmth. He was...
I remember the cold metal of the doorknob under my palm and the small, unreasonable hope that tonight—this night—would be the last night I had to beg the world for mercy. I breathed in and opened the door. He stood by the window with his back to me. The city lights cut across his shoulders. Even burned into memory, even in nightmares, I would know that shape. "Aiden?" I tried to make it a question. My voice came out thin. He turned. For a second the room reformed itself around...
I remember the moment like a bad song stuck on repeat: a teddy-bear interface blinking at me and a stack of scripts that smelled of fate and mildew. “This is your first assignment,” the assistant squealed, its voice too bright for a government node. “After completion, your placement in the Stability Bureau will be decided.” “Start when?” I asked. “Group whatever. I only want merit.” Molly Duffy—my assigned auxiliary, a plush-faced AI in a bureaucratic shell—tilted her head. “You’ll need...
I was standing in the rain, my son asleep in my arms, watching the street turn into a sheet of silver. The app said the car was there. The tail number made me pause for a second because it looked oddly familiar. "It’s here," I told myself, and I rushed, hugging Corbin tighter. The car was black. Tail digits 88. I slid into the back without thinking and shut the door like a person with no other options. The interior smelled faintly of leather and citrus. Too clean. Too...
1. "I am a bastard," I said once to myself in the dark when I was five and had not yet learned how shame could be tuned into armor. "That's not a word you should know yet," my mother snapped, cursing the phone in her hand. "Call him again. Call until he comes." "Who's he?" the concierge asked once when she dragged me to a hotel with a nervous laugh and one of her usual schemes. "His name is Dempsey Cao," my mother answered, eyes shining with the fever of someone who'd convinced...
“Don’t come any closer.” I said it before I could think. My voice shook anyway. Ewan stopped three steps away and stared at me like I had said something rude to the sun. “Relax,” he said. “It’s just a curtain.” “Not funny.” I tugged the towel tighter around me. He sighed, as if the world owed him patience. “You dry yet?” “I’m always dry,” I snapped, but I sat down on the edge of his bed anyway. I wanted to be where I could see him. I wanted him to know I could see him. His...
I am Gustav Duncan. I became a policeman because of her. "I want to know everything again," I said the afternoon Dixie Boehm brought me a cigarette and a photocopy of the painting. "Everything?" Dixie laughed and then pinched the cigarette out of my hand like she was taking a stubborn idea away. "You know I paint what I see. I don't tidy up truth." "I know," I said. "But the truth is a dangerous thing to leave alone." Dixie Boehm's painting was called Red Dress. It had made people...
"I won't get up yet," I croaked without opening my eyes. "Get up, Gwen! It's past dawn. Your breakfast is on the stove, but it's getting cold," my mother shouted through the thin door. "Fine. I'm up," I said, dragging the words like a blanket. Jana Hussein kept at it. "You lazy thing, always avoiding work. Eat and don't stay in bed all day." I stayed in bed a little longer and listened to the village wake. Birds, the distant clank of tools, people's voices going to the fields. I had...
I remember the palace laughter as if it were another country's weather — warm crowds, rising banners, and a kind of light that never reached the room where I sat. My name is Delaney Vogt, but everyone in the palace used "Empress" when they needed a shape for my duty and a sound for their resentment. When my throne was taken, the title stuck like a bruise. People still bowed; the names changed where worship had to be shown. "Delaney," Lily whispered, pulling a thin cloak around my shoulders....
They put my name on the giant banner and made the whole hotel smell like lilies and roasted meat. "I didn't ask for all this," I muttered, fingering the edge of the microphone. "Thank you, everyone." The applause washed over me like a warm current; the lights made my glasses glint. I tried to smile small. I tried to be the grateful, polite daughter everyone expected. "Indigo!" my mother called softly from the front row. "Say something about—" "Thank you," I said into the mic, and heard...
I never expected a three-day drive with my boyfriend's college friends to turn the nicest part of my year into the worst memory I would ever keep. I never expected to be the one who survived it, or to be the one who would watch what they did to themselves play out in front of everyone like some terrible, slow film. "Did you not say it would be just the five of us?" Hudson said the first time I noticed the look. "You said five," Lucille said with a brow raised like a question mark. She...
I smelled the night before it arrived — hot stone, old incense, a faint iron tang that made me straighten my spine even though I was already standing. "I'll take the bath," I told the servant who hovered by the window, and I said it like I was the sort of guest who could decide things. She curtsied. "Yes, Miss Ember. Everything will be ready." Her voice was small and honeyed, the sort that wants nothing and gives everything. Nobody noticed how I stilled. Nobody noticed that I had been...
