Quick reads you can finish in 10-30 minutes
Found 388 short novels in Face-Slapping
I waited four hours at the subway exit before he finally appeared. "You're late," I said when I saw him, though my voice didn't carry much accusation. It was rain-streaked glass and umbrellas and the city's tired light around us. Yousef Michel stepped out of a black car. He smelled of beer, but his eyes were clear. He reached for my suitcase and moved the umbrella so the rain didn't fall on me. "Why are you in North City?" he asked. "Visiting friends?" I didn't look at his face. I...
“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...
I never expected one message to rearrange my world. "A photo for you," read the chat preview. Then a small, smug line: "Your husband sleeps so sweet in my arms." I stared at the image until my eyes blurred. The man in the photo was unmistakable: Brady Fleming, my Brady, turned away so his face wasn't fully visible, but his broad shoulders and the little mole by his left ear—mine to remember—made it him. "Who is this?" I whispered to myself, but my voice sounded thin and useless in the...
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 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...
"Mountain rain, fox wedding, stay away," my grandmother used to mutter when the wind took a strange shape through the pines. "She told you that?" I said, and I always said it with the same lazy smile because I did not believe in warnings people dressed up as stories. I was born in a cold season under a thin moon, so they said. I was small and sharp as a crow's feather, and for a long time I kept the mountain air inside me like a secret. "My name is Sofia Jordan," I told myself aloud on...
When I woke up in that life, I opened my eyes to a living room that smelled like old money and jasmine. I blinked and found a pearl necklace on the side table, a framed photo of my late husband, and a ten-year-old shadow perched at the foot of the couch. "Mom," she said, small and steady. "Don't be sad. When I grow up, I'll take care of you like Dad did." I laughed, then cried. "All right," I said. "From now on, I'm your real mom." My name is Marcella Bridges. I was thirty-five, wore...
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,...
I remember the first sentence Hernando said in the doorway as if it still had the dust of that morning on it. "Elijah, I heard you have a car—can we borrow it?" I closed the glass door before his second breath, and the word came out hard and polite: "Sorry. Fuel is scarce. We don't lend the car." Hernando put a hand to the glass and did not pull away. He looked too thin to be lying. "It's not renting a car. It's an alliance," he said. "There's a little market hidden in the Lishui...
The sun was already high enough to bleach the yard stones when I stopped at the gate of the Wells house. A thin spring wind threaded between cloak and collar and found the skin beneath. I pulled my hood back and let my hair fall; he looked up from his hand on the gate as if the day had been waiting for me. He met my eyes and for a breath the boy I remembered surfaced—honest, startled. Then my face hardened like a coin in a blacksmith’s fist. I took the wedding contract from my bag and laid...
I spat a string of bubbles and bit down on something hard and cold. "Ugh," I muttered, my tail flicking. "Who made food this miserable?" The crystal shard tasted like frozen stone, but it kept me alive. I was a fish—bright red, scales like embers—and there was a black mark on my left shoulder that looked like a half-winged butterfly. I had fallen from a circus swing, remember? One minute I was flying above the tents, the next I was sinking into a pond that felt like the inside of a...
I still remember the way his room smelled like cheap cologne and old pizza when I found them. It was supposed to be a surprise—his birthday present wrapped in tissue, my hands shaking because I wanted it to feel right—but the surprise landed me in the doorway of a scene that told me everything I needed to know. "Who is she?" I said. "She's just a friend," Jackson Hassan said without looking up. "Just a friend who takes off her shirt in your bed?" I said. "Let's not make a scene,"...
I woke to snow on my sleeves and a man kneeling in the courtyard refusing to stand. "Get up," I told him, and the snow rimed his hair like a crown he had not wanted. "Your Highness," he said, without looking up. "I cannot." "Then I'll shelter your head from the cold." I held my umbrella over him because that was the only comfort I could spare. "Your Highness," he said again, finally raising his eyes. "I already have someone I love. I cannot go through with the marriage." I let...
“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...
I put the photo up for five minutes, then went to bed. "You're going to regret posting that," Hattie texted before I even opened my eyes. "Why?" I typed back, blinking at the sunlight. "It's just a picture with Leon." "Because the internet is hungry," she sent, with a laughing emoji. "Also, don't be surprised if you get weird comments. People are hungry for drama." I laughed and left my phone on the desk. We had a quiet morning—lectures, coffee, the little rituals that had made the...
"I think we should talk tonight," I said, lighting a candle. "It’s Friday," Brooks said, smiling like he always did on our ritual nights. "Our deep talk night." "I know." I poured the wine. "Just—let's be honest, okay?" He laughed and kissed my temple. "Always honest." Then I saw it: a fresh red spot on the back of his shoulder, right by the spine. It looked like someone had popped it earlier that day. "Who did that?" I asked instead of asking anything subtle. "I—" He didn't...
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 am Jaylah Cherry," I said when they first asked my name in the East Court. "I am Canon David's wife." "You're his white moon," Canon David whispered, fingers warm around my hand. "You will be—" "I will be with you," I finished for him. "If you go, I go." "You won't resent me?" he asked once, the day before the throne was publicly sealed and Kadence Brown was named Empress. "I won't resent you," I answered with a smile that fixed the hurt somewhere below my ribs. "What you want, I...
My son arrived at my door like a salesman with a mission and a fat, foolish grin. "Mom," Max said, breathless as if he'd been rehearsing this speech for weeks, "I don't want to struggle anymore. I'm going to be a live-in son-in-law." "A live-in what?" I set the kettle down so hard the water hid its shock in a hiss. "At Margarita's," Max explained, proud as a man with a brand-new watch. "Her family is rich. She wants me. I'm marrying her. I can't help you take care of you anymore." He...
"I opened my eyes and spat blood," I said, and the room answered with old wood creaking. "I told you not to come to town today," my mother whispered, half asleep on the kang. "You are weak." "I will go," I said. "I will bring them back." They had tied me to a bed once. They had left me for dead on a stone floor. They had slit the cart wheel under my feet and pushed the horse. I died with the taste of blood and the name of the woman who ruined my family on my lips. Now I was back. I...
