Quick reads you can finish in 10-30 minutes
Found 388 short novels in Face-Slapping
“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 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 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...
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...
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...
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 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...
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 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...
"You want twenty million dollars to shut up?" I set the laptop down and watched the black bar of the video loop again. "Yes," the man on the other end typed, his voice calm. "Wire it to the account. Or the photos go live." I tapped the table with my fingernail and smiled without warmth. "Tell me your name." "Jack," he said. "Or the name my boss calls me." I stood and walked to the window. The city was a gray sheet of glass. The sky wanted nothing from anyone. "Wire it," I...
I was fifteen the first time everything switched. "My name is Berkley," I told the mirror then, trying on a smile I didn't feel. "You will go to college. You will not—" "Stop that," my mother said from the doorway, folding laundry with hands that smelled like starch and medicine. "You're fine the way you are." "What if I'm not?" I asked. I was fifteen and already practiced in being broken. She laughed and put a hand on my head. "Don't be melodramatic. Come help me with 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...
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 remember the hospital like a kept photograph: stainless light, the thin scent of disinfectant, and him kneeling beside my bed, suit tailored to extreme, bowing as if the floor could redeem him. "Davina," he whispered, voice cracked like ice, "don't— don't go." "I smile," I tried to say. "You like my smile." My teeth tasted of blood and the words were small. My hand found his cheek. He was gorgeous even then—Knox Ali, my husband, like a dark statue come alive. "Promise me one thing,"...
"I saw your photo on the campus forum." "Who said that?" I said, dropping my bag on the bed. Joan, Lena and Nina crowded around like jurors. "You!" Joan opened my phone and shoved it toward me. "You didn't know?" I stared at the blurred library photo. It was me and a boy, close together, heads bent over a book. The caption screamed we were dating. My heart thudded dumbly. "That's not even his face," I said. "I don't know him." Lena waved a finger. "He’s Alexander Cunningham....
The day I walked out of the prison, two men were waiting in the snow. One had signed the papers that sent me in. One had stood at the prosecutor’s table and watched me sentenced. They looked like two pale snowmen in black coats. I ignored them both. "Take care of yourself once you get out," the guard said as he opened the gate. "I will," I said. I didn't feel like promising anything to anyone. Through the iron bars I could see two black cars idling in the flurries. A dark...
I didn't expect weddings to mean anything to me. "I do," Cedar Eaton said, sliding the ring toward my finger. "Wait—" The hall held its breath. My breath stuck halfway. The chapel doors burst open. "Dad!" a small voice cried. Cedar's hand froze. The ring stopped half on my knuckle. I saw him, the perfect groom, turn like someone had pulled a string. A woman stood in the doorway, immaculate, mascara dark as guilt. She held a small boy by the hand. His hair stuck up like he had...
I learned to hold my breath when my family talked about my brother as if he were the only important child in the house. “Penn will go to a top high school for sure,” Dad crowed at the family dinner, patting the boy on the head with pride like he was a prize calf. “Three thousand a month is nothing," Mom chimed. "Girls never do as well. Look at other families — their daughters can’t even hold a job.” I smiled at the sink while the plates steamed and the words boiled in me. I rinsed a...
I opened my eyes to straw, low beams, and the smell of smoke and old grain. "Where am I?" I whispered. Someone laughed softly. "You're home, Cataleya," said my mother. No. I corrected myself in silence. I am Cataleya Suzuki — back from a life I'd earned with blood and orders, and yet my name on the lintel read wrong. I felt the room like a borrowed uniform that didn't fit. Stale air, a warped roof, the faint iron taste of river mud. My head throbbed with the memory of water...
I still remember the damp smell of the ditch where my life began: wet earth, old blood, and the hurried, broken steps of two people who decided I was too small a thing to keep. They left me in a ragged bundle and went away like shame on two legs. "Leave her," the woman said. "There is no place for a babe." "Better the dead eat her than the living starve," the man answered. I was not human then—at least, I did not know what words meant—but I knew hands. I knew heat. When a big gray hand...
