Quick reads you can finish in 10-30 minutes
Found 136 short novels in Rebirth
I woke up with my mouth full of dust and my head full of someone else’s memories. The first taste was of iron and rain from a dream where I had been more monster than girl. The second taste, when I finally opened my eyes for real, was instant regret and the cheap flavor of instant noodles. "My name is Kennedi," I said to myself. "Kennedi Duncan. Not a monster, not yet." "Kennedi!" someone hissed outside the door. "If you're still in there, hurry. We leave in five." I pushed the door...
I woke to cold that pinched my bones and a dark roof above me that felt like an insult. I sat up, felt the thin cotton of my jacket, and cursed in my head: this is not how a special-operations soldier wakes. “Are you awake?” a small voice whispered. I blinked. The moon let a sliver of light through the door crack. I counted the breaths around me — three children, the thin rise and fall of a woman on her side, and my own heavy breath. “This is Kamryn,” I told myself out loud, like an...
I woke up to someone shouting, “Get up, class is starting!” and for a second I thought I was still the farm girl who answered to no name. Then I blinked and realized I was in my dorm bed, in a university that smelled like instant noodles and detergent, and my phone buzzed with an alert: “Live feed active — viewer count rising.” “I don’t remember setting a live,” I muttered. “My bad, you fell asleep in the lab again,” Kiara said from the bunk across. “You okay? You look pale.” “I’m...
I wake up choking on smoke and the smell of burning sugar—like the green mung cakes my mother used to promise me when she came back from the kitchen. "This can't be happening again," I whisper. "Kaylie—" my mother's voice is warm and soft, and the room is exactly like the one I remember, seven years into her cover. "Mom, I'm hungry." I run to her like any six‑year‑old would, clutching the small phone she leaves on the nightstand. "Don't run, stay with me." Lenora Price smooths my...
I woke with the taste of metal and dust in my mouth, the room tilting as if the world were a poorly balanced scale. My hand was steady enough to find the bowl at the bedside, but when the man in black leaned over me and drove a blade across my wrist, I knew the past was not a dream. "Don't move." A voice, cold as mountain snow, told me to be still. "Hold. Breathe." I tasted blood and remembered everything. I remembered running from my home across the border, remembering the thrill and the...
I remember the bowl—the thin porcelain that trembled in my hands. I remember the cold in the hall and the soldiers pushing people forward like they were sheep. I remember Azariah Gardner handing me the bowl and the number floating over his head: 80. "Pour it all down," he said, voice as flat as river ice. I looked at him. "You're sure?" I asked. He shrugged, unreadable. "The order came from the throne. Drink." I lifted the bowl to my lips. I could see numbers over everyone: some...
I was sixty and I had learned to like the quiet. "Mom," my daughter Christina called, "we're here. Happy birthday." "I know," I said, and I meant it. I knew everything worth knowing about small kindnesses. I knew how a cup of tea could be a whole afternoon. I knew how a child’s warm head on my knee could make the world make sense again. "Tell me a story, Grandma," Chie begged, climbing into my lap and looking up with the kind of bright, unguarded face children get before the world...
"I opened my eyes to a stranger's ceiling." I sat up so fast the room spun. Silk that smelled faintly of ink and early tea brushed my wrists. My name rushed at my lips—Ami Buckley—but the mouth that formed it tasted like someone else's name: Isabella Dyer. My chest tightened. Memory after memory hit me like winter. "I remember him," I said aloud. "Nehemias." A voice at the door—thin, practical—"Miss Isabella? You awake?" I swallowed. "Yes. Send my mother." Minutes later, the...
I wake to a scrap of paper floating onto my chest. "What is this—" I whisper, fingers fumbling the folded leaf, then blink. The handwriting is flourished, elegant, sharp: the divorce note that killed her. My head explodes with pain and then with other people's memories. I clamp my eyes shut and breathe in a world that smells of bamboo and boiling rice. The past—my past, the life I left—slams into me, and the new life in this body fits like a borrowed shawl. "My name is Elaina Coulter,"...
I have woken up in other people's beds more times than I can count. "Sleep," Valentin Archer said the very first thing to me the first time he found me in that place where the moonlight never seemed to reach. "Sleep," he said every night after. "Sleep," he said like a prayer, like a command, like a lullaby that would bend my life into quiet curves until it broke. I don't like being told what to do. I especially don't like being told to sleep when I'm wide awake. "Sleep," he told me...
"I don't hear you answering, Antonia! Antonia, are you even alive?" someone kept calling. I opened my eyes to sunlight that smelled of smoke and damp straw. My head felt like it had been stamped on. I touched the back of my skull and my fingers came away with a smear of dried blood and a strip of coarse cloth tied around a wound. "This can't be the office," I said to myself before I remembered my mouth couldn't say it out loud because no one else was in the small room. The room looked...
I woke to a broken sky and pain like iron stitching through my skull. "Is she breathing?" a coarse voice asked somewhere close. "Good riddance if she's dead," another voice said, mean and flat. "Don't say that. If the marquis asks, we'll say we went out and couldn't find her," the first voice muttered. I closed my fingers and felt my own blood. My head throbbed. Someone had said "marquis," and the name rolled like a stone inside me. I tried to remember the kitchen, the pressure...
I remember the first time I decided to be cruel on purpose. The snow had not yet thawed and a hostage-prince knelt, pale and shivering like a statue that had been carved from ice. His lips trembled, a vein at his temple pulsing slow and red. He looked up at me as if he still believed mercy might be an option. "Your Highness, I was wrong," he said, voice barely a rasp. "I know I was wrong." I told a slave, "Beat him. Do it until you think he will die." They did not refuse. They always...
I remember the coffee spilling first. "Fill this out," Professor Ulrich Frank had said, and his voice sounded like a bell I could not stop hearing. I saw Laurel Li bent over the paper, hair tucked behind her ear, the way she always concentrated before a test. She was so quiet, so careful. It made me feel sharp, like a knife. "Alonso, don't loiter," Ulrich added without looking at me. The office smelled of old books and coffee. I moved closer. The camera in the corner had a red light. I...
I woke in my throne room with a booklet on my face and an afternoon of unread reports stacked like lazy soldiers on the desk before me. The tapestry smelled faintly of smoke, like a hearth gone cold. My gold-encrusted chair creaked when I shifted. I always hated waking with paperwork across my eyes. “Where are you, boss?” a voice boomed so loud the banners flapped. I snatched the booklet away and bared my teeth in what everyone assumed was a smile. “TIGER,” I snapped. “You in here,...
I died under a clear summer sky. "I remember the swallows under the eaves," I said aloud to no one in particular, and the words sounded like they came from another life. "I remember the jade pendant." Aviana Albert, my handmaid who had never left my side, stood by the window and lowered her voice. "Maggie, you slept for three days. Please—eat." "I did eat," I said, lifting the bowl, but my fingers were still ghostly from the memory. "I remember the fire. I remember the smoke." Aiden...
I opened my eyes to dust and a dry, cracked smell like old bones and summer gone wrong. "She's awake!" a rough voice called. "Give her water, some food, then leave," another voice answered. For a second I thought I was back in the van with the team. Then my stomach knotted, memory like a broken dam poured in, and I realized I was not in any van. "Where am I? Did my dog open a door again?" I muttered, more to myself than anyone else. "Woof!" A familiar bark answered—not outside,...
"I'll sing it. Right here. Right now." The words left my throat like a confession. My knees were raw from the pavement. The city lights blurred into halos and people’s faces were just dark shapes and flashes of phone screens. Logan Picard stood under the club canopy, a shadow inside a shadow, watching me as if I were an animal he had trained. "You will sing it," he said. "And you will beg for mercy while you sing." "Logan..." My voice cracked. "Please." He smiled like the verdict...
I woke up to the taste of iron and snow. "It can't be—" I croaked, throat raw as if sand had been ground through it. "Shh," the woman with hands like a child's but an old heart pressed a cloth to my mouth. "Miss, please, don't make a scene." I pushed the memory back like a knife. The cold cellar, the rusted door, the laughter that tasted like blood. The face soaked in gilded silk, the laughter that promised a throne and delivered a tomb. Cordelia Dodson. Chie Omar. Their names had been...
They all restarted but me. I know this because Hayden marched into my dorm and blurted it out like a verdict. "You, Johanna Jackson, are going to be dumped tomorrow," she said, eyes wide, like she had swallowed a secret too sharp for her throat. The next morning my boyfriend of three years walked out and snarled, "Someone else stuck up for you? I'm done." He left with a bruise on his face and an accusation that landed like a slap. Hayden kept talking. "We came back, Jo. We rewound....
