Quick reads you can finish in 10-30 minutes
Found 136 short novels in Rebirth
I remember saying it like a dare. "Buy the top floor. Trust your wife," Estrella said, eyes bright like she had some secret. "Buy the top floor?" I laughed. "Are you serious?" "Yes. Top floor comes with the roof terrace," she said. "We could grow things up there. We could — I don't know — be safe." I argued. I listed heat problems, roof leaks, ladder troubles. I listed everything I could think of against the top floor. Then everything happened the way I'd already lived it once,...
I remember the slap of the earth beneath my palms, the stupid clack of a heel against a stone, and then nothing like logic at all. One moment I was late for a night shift at a convenience store in the city; the next I woke up as the village girl everyone called "the fourth." My name here was nothing. My name here was the shoulder for everyone else to lean on. My thoughts were mine, but my body belonged to a family that would rather feed their pigs than feed a child. "You're awake," my...
I opened my eyes to dirt and dark, and a voice I had never heard before arguing about money filled the night. "Two meters is enough. Hurry—if we don't finish before dawn, she won't pay," one man hissed. "Fifty? Ridiculous. A hundred—or she can keep the mess," the other answered, laughing. I blinked at blackness. My head throbbed. "Where am I?" I tried to move and pain shot through my chest like someone had lit a fuse. The village smells—wet mud, old straw—hit me, but the words the men...
I watched my own body on the pavement as if it belonged to someone else. It looked like a rag doll. My legs were folded into impossible angles, blood steaming in the hot sun. My long coat had been shredded into ribbons. People had already gathered, phones out. Someone swore and said a Bentley had stopped. The Bentley’s hood had little red splashes on it. I should have shouted, "It wasn’t my fault." I should have told them it was an accident. I had so many half-written emails, so many...
I woke to cold water poured over my head. A bucket of frozen water slammed down and the ice pain tasted like metal. My hands were bound with enchanted cords, my skin a map of whip marks, my once-white robe soaked in blood until the cloth no longer had a color to claim. I coughed, blood thick in my throat. "That pool is sacred," I croaked. "You're wasting it on me." "You know your place, Giulia?" a young celestial lord snapped, his eyes rimmed red. He raised his voice like a bell. "How...
I remember the press room lights like a white glare that never cooled. I remember the host's grin, the camera lenses, the pressure. I remember my hand—wrapped in bandage—on my phone, and the game we had just lost. I remember a taped-on task: call the first contact in my phone and say "I miss you." "Elise, are you ready?" the host whispered into my ear. I swallowed. "Ready." The phone rang. It walked through the long hollow seconds like an echo. When a man answered, his voice was colder...
The first time Avianna died in my arms, Grant was at a rooftop party celebrating some girl's birthday. "You promised you'd come," I said once, through tears, when his voice finally reached me like a distant echo. "It was just—" he began, and then the line went dead. I held Avianna's small, warm body, the bell on her wrist chiming once, and the world narrowed to that one ringing sound and the coldness of a hospital roof. Then I jumped. I woke up to my twenty-third birthday. The cake...
"I can't feel the fever anymore," I said, blinking at the sun like it had surprised me. "You look like you rolled down the hill," Luca Khan said, hands in his pockets, voice flat as winter stone. "It was steep," I managed. "Who—who are you?" "You should be asking where you were going at all in that state." He sounded stern, like the kind of man who judged angles and motives. "I'm Luca." "I—Kylie," I answered, because it felt right. "Kylie Carter. Thank you." "You should go see a...
“Mr. Barton, the pre-op checks are finished.” The hospital corridor smelled like antiseptic and rain. The light made Ezra Barton’s profile sharper than any photograph. He didn’t turn his head. He only tightened his jaw. “Begin.” A red light blinked behind him. Shouts came from the operating room—metallic, urgent. “No! Don’t take my baby! Sergio, this is our child. How can you be so cruel—get away from me!” I heard the woman scream and then lines like knives: “Hemorrhage!...
I died in fire and flew above my own ruin like a thin strip of smoke. "You need to wake up," I told myself, but I could not wake. "My son," I watched him chant the little lines we taught, small fingers clenching and unclenching. "He says Mama," the boy whispered, and his voice cut through me like glass. "I can reach him," I tried to touch him. "But my hand passed through his cheek." I could see everything. I could see Daphne Nielsen's long nails tighten around the child's neck...
I woke up to a math test I had no business failing. "Sixty-five," the scanner scored on the paper under Joelle's hand. I laughed in a quiet classroom and everyone stared. "Joelle, shut up," someone hissed. "Why are you laughing?" the monitor asked across the desks. "I'm not Joelle," I said, because saying the truth kept my mouth from going soft. I looked at the hand that belonged to the girl everyone called Joelle Laurent. The skin was pale and the fingers were delicate. My...
I am dead. Then I was assigned a system. Then I almost broke my wrist on a wire and had to learn how to lie beautifully to a camera. "It isn't fair," I said to the empty room, and the room only smelled of antiseptic and cheap coffee. "It is never fair." The woman on the hospital bed looked like a porcelain doll someone had dropped. Her lashes trembled. I—Lacey Rivera—opened my eyes inside someone else's ruined body. "You're awake," a nurse said. "You were lucky. You fainted from shock....
I have never been the sort of man who trusted ghosts or prayers. "I don't trust any of it," I told him, voice level enough that the study's paper lanterns did not flicker. Simon Church folded his robe with the practiced calm of someone who has talked a man down from a cliff too many times. "And yet you came," he said. "I came," I agreed, "because I wanted to know if the impossible could be asked for one final time." "You want resurrection," Simon said plainly. "You want your... wife...
I gasp and the river answers with a splash. "Where am I?" I whisper, tasting river mud and something else—iron and old grief. My hands are wrong. My hands are soft, nails neat. They do not look like the burned, bitten hands I remember when I died. I blink. The sky is a pale band of gold and cloud. Lean reeds brush my face. A small shape coils at my wrist and turns its triangle head toward me. "Little Jade." I breathe the name like a prayer. The snake lifts its red tongue. It is my...
When I rose to godhood, the whole sky thought I had stolen a crown. "You stole her rank," they whispered. "She took Princess Bethany's place." They were wrong, and they were loud. "I didn't steal anything," I said once, folding my hands. "I only took what never belonged to any of you." "You dare—" Bethany hitched her skirts and made a show of trembling. "You dare speak like that to a princess?" "Princess," I repeated, and the word tasted like ash in my mouth. "You love the word....
I woke to cold hands pulling at my arms and a dozen rough faces leaning over me. "What's going on? She isn't dead—stop! Don't touch my girl!" a woman's voice sobbed above me. I squinted. Mud, straw, and the smell of smoke. I tried to remember water, the downward rush, the cutting cold—then the wedge of a shark's jaw in a breathless flash. I shouldn't be here. I wasn't supposed to be here. "Let go," a man's voice snapped. "She's dead. We have to bury her and leave before dawn." "She...
I remember the cold first. Snow came down like white paper, slow and stubborn. I remember the white of my fur, the thinness of his sleeves, and the way the world seemed to tune itself to one small foot. "It is enough," I said. He looked up at me from the snow. His face was thinner than I had expected. His knuckles were frozen and cracked. He kept his back straight as if wood still held him up, and his eyes were knives wrapped in ice. "Miss Florence," he said, and his voice was raw....
I sneezed and woke up cold. I blinked and realized two things at once: the silk against my skin was wrong, and my hair was dripping. I sat up and water ran down my neck and into my lap. "Ah—" I started, then touched my cheek. Someone hit me. A woman in green sat in a high chair and looked at me with a slow, measuring stare. She wore enough jade and pearls to make my modern, red-carpet wardrobe jealous. Her smile had no warmth. "Who is this insolent girl?" she said. "Autumn, teach...
I first learned the feel of my own ribs the way others learn to read—by touch, by habit, by repetition until the shock dulls. "Show me," Findlay said in the dream again, and I laughed because the words had become a ritual between us: a way for him to prove I wouldn't betray him, and for me to prove that there was nothing left I wouldn't give. I do not look like people imagine. I do not look like those pretty heroines for whom lanterns are hung and songs are written. When I was...
I hit the ground so hard the dry leaves stung my cheek like a slap. "Ugh—" I pushed myself up, wiping grit from my mouth, and the world smelled wrong: old sap, wet earth, and something like burned wood. "Beautiful, so beautiful—skin like milk, scent to raise the dead," coaxed a voice that should not exist. A tall thing moved between trunks, its face half-hidden by curling vines. Red eyes glowed from the knot of bark where a human face should be. It laughed in a way that made my bones feel...
