Quick reads you can finish in 10-30 minutes
Found 17 short novels in Healing/Redemption
I remember the shape of the footprint before I remember the sky that night. "I stepped into it," I told no one at first. "You're laughing," my mother said when I tried to explain. "Soledad, who did you meet in the woods?" "I met nobody," I answered. "Then why is your belly up?" she snapped, and the palm on my face burned longer than the surprise. "Don't speak like that," I whispered, pressing my hand against the growing hollow. "I didn't—" "You did," she cut in. "You walked in...
I am Gwen Cameron. I write scary stories in the small hours, because the dark makes the words easier. Tonight, the dark is louder than my stories. "Don't make a sound! Someone got into the dorm!" Alexandra Roberts texted me out of nowhere. "Alex? Why are you up?" I whispered, though the phone was on my chest and nobody could hear me. "That thing should be at your 203 soon. Someone on floor three messed with a pen spirit. I told the teacher. It’s coming down. Pretend to be asleep,...
I found the note under Autumn's pillow with a hand that was still shaky enough to make the ink blot. "Don't go into the extra room," it said. "What extra room?" I whispered to the quiet apartment, and the ceiling answered with nothing at all. I should have listened better to Autumn the week before. She had tried to tell me something. She had started to say it and then stopped. "I was thinking—" she had begun, with that uneven laugh she used when she pretended to be easy. "After the...
I was taking off my bra in the bathroom, a little buzzed from wine and a little ashamed of the wine, when I saw him in the mirror. "Hi," said a face that was too young to be steady in any reflection. He looked like a high-school kid—thin, all sharp angles and bone, hair like he had not seen a barber in a while. "Who are you?" I managed. My voice came out thin. He didn't blink. "Luke." Luke. He was right there, clear as the glass, staring without expression. "You're—" I stopped....
“Carry him inside!” I shouted before I even knew who I was anymore. Snow hit my face and tasted like metal. I followed Finch Deleon and two burly guards through the courtyard toward a boy kneeling in the white. He was thin under a too-large robe, one hand buried in snow, the other wrapped in filthy bandages. Blood bled through the wrap and freckled the drifts. “He’s losing feeling,” Finch said, breath steaming. “Miss, should we—?” I straightened. My whole chest felt like it had been...
I remember the exact number on the paper before I remember the way my hand shook holding it. "Seven twenty-eight," I said aloud even though no one else needed to hear it. "You got seven twenty-eight?" The voice next to me sounded small and steady. "Yes." I looked up. Her smile was fragile and terrible and real. "Thank you." She shrugged. "You earned it." I had earned the score with two bodies pulling in the same direction. One of us had always tried to please. The other had learned...
"I slammed the little gate shut before the chicken could slip back in." I held the stick like it was a sword. I was five, and I had a job: guard the cabbage. "Get out! That patch is ours!" I shouted at a fat hen that only cared about green leaves. "Mabel, she's scolding a chicken again," someone called, laughing. Mabel Sutton stepped in, fanning her face with a rag. "Delilah, you're a brave one. Your parents can sleep easy with you here," she said. "I'm five," I answered, proud....
I did not wake up to sirens. I woke up to the weight of an arm across my waist. "Morning," he murmured into the hollow at my neck, voice still thick from sleep. "I—" I tried to move, tried to remember how to breathe without sounding like a prisoner. My hand lay flat against the cold metal of the alarm clock; the band on my finger caught the light. "You asleep last night?" he asked, lips finding the soft skin there. "Yes," I lied, because the truth would be more honest than I could...
I remember the first time the world noticed him without meaning to notice me. "You've been trending," Eliza said, tapping my phone. "Who?" I managed, because the studio smelled like charcoal and turpentine and his shoes—Eliot Marques always left an oil-smudged trail. "Your boyfriend. The video is everywhere." I held the phone in front of him. He had his leg thrown over the easel, a piece of paper crushed between his long fingers. He looked up at me the way he always did—like I was...
“I remember my mother putting me down and walking out of the kitchen.” The house smelled like boiled rice and smoke. My aunt stood at the door with her hands full. My grandmother watched from the stove. No one made a sound. “She’ll be safer here for now,” my mother said without looking back. I was three days old when I first felt someone else’s hand hold me. I don’t remember the cold. I remember the voice that called me, clear as a bell. “Come to Dad.” The man who took me from my...
I remember the temple as a river of blood and wood smoke, candles guttering like dying stars. I remember skirts stuck to muddy legs, the smell of iron and wet earth. I remember looking up and finding a man among the dead who was not dead. He only said two words. "Save me," he croaked. I had once saved a starving pup and failed; I had cried for it for days. So when I hauled the man onto a stray pallet and carried him home to the little courtyard my mother left me, I told myself I would not...
"Move," I hissed, hauling him up by the collar. The stench of earth and old bone filled my nose. I had just woken on a hill of dead things and now a man's weight was on my shoulder. He moaned, a thin sound that might have been a name. "Don't talk," I warned. "Just breathe." He coughed. Blood stained his sleeve. I looked at his face in the moonlight. He was young. Too young to look like he had been beaten into a map of bruises. "Who are you?" I asked, sitting him against a...
I was supposed to be at the high school hall for the hundred-day pep rally, but my mother dragged me to the hospital for a check-up. On my eighteenth birthday she handed me a folder. Inside was a kidney transplant consent form. "You must sign," she said. "No," I said. She did not let go of the paper. She looked at me with a focus I had never seen before. Her eyes were raw with a tiredness I knew too well, but there was no softness for me. Only for my brother. He lay across the...
I couldn't remember the exact date of our wedding anniversary until the office calendar reminded me with a red dot—except that day on my phone was April 15, not July 20, and my memory had knots where the years should be. Still, I stood in Finn's company lobby, clutching my bag like a talisman and tapping his number. "How much longer?" I typed, and his reply came quick. "About half an hour." I sat on the cold sofa and listened to the hum of air and shoes. Two colleagues passed me,...
I woke up three days after they stole me and the world felt small as my knees. I sat on an old flower-patterned sheet, my skin crawling with rashes, my lips raw and dry. I had no will to move. The room smelled of smoke and old sweat. There was a scrape of a door. A tall man came in, wearing a wide straw hat. He had a dark face, heavy clothes, pants rolled to his knees and shoes caked with mud. A bowl of noodles sat on the table, a wet, soggy lump. He stopped near me and asked, "Are you...
I didn’t expect the last thing I did before the world tipped over would become my saving grace. “I welded the gate,” I told them before they knew what to call me in the new days. “You what?” Mrs. Hilda Black shouted from below, her voice bouncing off the concrete like a jury banging gavel. “I welded the gate!” I said again, as calm as a woman announcing market hours. “You son of a—who welded the gate?” someone else swore. The words in the courtyard were full of heat and anger and...
I open the book because the night smells of candles and old paper. "Do you think the dead hold grudges?" I ask the page as if it will answer. A shadow knocks my head with a cool fingertip. "Are you still reading at this hour, Imani?" Griffin Lindstrom teases like he used to, like the world hasn't split itself into before-and-after. I slap away his hand. "It's late," I say, though my voice trembles a little. "You should—" He laughs. "You would say that even if I were a ghost." The...
