Quick reads you can finish in 10-30 minutes
Found 136 short novels in Rebirth
I woke up to a chorus of petty, greedy voices calling my name like I was some village relic. "Janessa, take that jeweled collar for a week—I'll return it." "Janessa, that embroidered gown belongs in my chest. I'll wear it tonight!" "Janessa, that little inkstone—I'll gift it to the girl at the school, just lend it to me." "Janessa, leave the gemstone bracelet. You'll make the ancestor proud." My head banged against the carved bedhead. I tasted ash in my throat. When I forced my lids...
I died in the third year of the zombie outbreak. We were out of gas, out of spare parts, and out of hope. I died because my fiancé and my best friend shoved me into the teeth of the swarm for a can of spoiled food. I opened my eyes and it was morning. My phone said one month until the outbreak — one month. The same city, the same suburbs, but a clean slate. "You're breathing," I told myself out loud. My parents had left me a house in the suburbs. I lived at the university dorms in the...
I never wanted to be a villain. The book said I was one, and the book had my fate all tied up: schemer, failure, lonely death. I learned that on my wedding night. "I am Anastasia Krueger," I said aloud to the dim room. "Not 'porridge' or any nickname. Remember that." Roberto Abdullah, my brother, closed his ledger and looked at me like I was a small, stubborn bird. "You should sleep. There is court tomorrow." "I am not tired." I hugged the blanket as if it were a shield. "I will not...
I discovered I was the villain of someone else's story. I had kept Prince Apollo Shaw captive at my side, indulging him for three headstrong years until I loved him like a fool. I served him as if he were my father. I fed him, fussed over his coughs, warmed his brittle hands with my own. He was poor and sick, or so everyone said. He wore the same white robe for days, pale as frost and thinner than a reed. I believed the whispering world that laughed at him: “The prince can’t even afford...
I was given one do-over: the day he confessed. "Felix, I like you," he said, voice both shy and honest. "Eden, will you—?" I let the cigarette smoke hang between my fingers like a curtain and smiled. "Okay," I said. "Let's try." That small "okay" was the only capital I had left: my face, a passport into other people's promises, my willingness to risk. I had loved only one man in the life before—Rex—and he never loved me the way I needed. He married me like he checked a box. This...
I spat salt water and grit out of my mouth and blinked at a roof that threatened to fall through the sky. "Where am I?" I said aloud, though my throat felt like dry paper. A boy with eyes too old for his face leaned over me with a wooden cup and poured water down my throat. He was five, maybe six, all knees and big, terrified eyes. "You're awake!" he cried. "Sister, you finally woke up." "I—" I pushed the fog from my head. My body ached as if someone had taken strings and jerked...
"I can't breathe." I, Bella Sun, said it out loud before I really understood where I was. "Hey, get up. This is not a place to sleep," an old woman snapped, spitting a few angry syllables at me. I blinked into bright sun and smelled vegetables and frying oil. My hand slipped on a cold brick. My last memories were white lights and a wet hospital room and a man named Phoenix Delgado standing over me, smiling like a judge. "Who are you?" the old man with a red armband barked. "I'm—" I...
I fell in love with a man who hated me. "I love you," I said once, in a life when I still thought love could save a thing. He laughed like ice breaking. "You make me tired," he said. "You make me remember things I do not want to remember." That was Isaiah Faure. He wore the black around him like breath. He was the one who came to take my life every time, and every time he looked at me, the look on his face was a blade. I remember being a pig first. "You're a pig again," someone...
I am Marina Bentley. I read the book, I loved the sad man, and I thought saving him would be simple. Then everything went wrong in the very first night of my marriage. "Lift the red veil," they said in the hall, and when the silk fell I looked at Dion Olson and thought: he is exactly like the book—quiet, pale, proper, with a face carved by slow winters. "May I offer a cup?" he said softly. "I—" I started, and then he said it. "I am told I have lived before," he said. "I loved you...
“Will you come tomorrow?” I asked. There was a long, careful silence on the line. Then Mai Boyle’s voice, small and steady: “Important?” “Very,” I said. “You’re the only friend I’ve had for twenty years. I want you there.” “Okay.” She said it like someone closing a door. I should have heard the catch in her breath. I didn’t. The next morning at nine I stood in my tuxedo ready to walk down an aisle I’d planned for months. The garden was full of flowers in the way diplomats...
I woke before dawn, because habit from a life I remembered like a map—old, worn, and deadly clear—pulled me out of bed. The small house smelled of night sweat and straw. I padded across the floor, careful not to wake Maxwell, and washed my face in the cold water we kept for mornings. "My jacket," he mumbled from the bed without opening his eyes. I hung it over my arm and went out the door with a shovel. The earth was the same, the sky thin and hard as a coin. At the irrigation entrance...
I woke with my head on someone’s chest and the world smelled of smoke and river water and the salt of someone’s tears. “Hudson,” I whispered, because it was the only name that would stop my heart from pounding so hard it felt like it would break my ribs. He tightened his arms around me as if fear itself had hands. “Hold me.” Hudson Brady’s voice was thin and raw. “Madeline,” he said. “Don’t—please don’t leave me.” I wanted to laugh and choke at the same time. I wanted to tell him this...
"Where are the crash victims they just brought in? Is there a girl named Eliza Cox?" I ran into the emergency entrance like a wind and gasped, "Please, tell me quickly." The nurse blinked, then pointed. "They're fine. One girl—mild concussion. She passed out. We moved her upstairs." "Thank you!" I said, and ran. I was late for a date I hadn’t wanted—arranged by my family—but I still expected a quiet coffee, a stiff handshake and then escape. I did not expect a crash on the way. I...
I did not expect to wake up and find the world very nearly the same, and yet everything wrong in a way only I could feel. "We thought you were gone," Stefan said the first time he saw me. He had the same gravel in his voice as always, like a road that had been walked on too often. "We thought you were done for, Ethan." "I thought so too," I said. I let myself be called Ethan because names are brittle things and I liked the sound of this one when it slipped from Stefan's mouth. "I tried...
I woke up to rain and the taste of iron, and for a wild second I thought I was still falling. "Who left her here?" a voice barked in the dark. "Move her. It's pouring." "I said move her!" another man spat, and boots thudded on wet soil. I lay on my back and blinked. The sky was a slit of gray; wind threw rain like a curtain. My head hurt like it had been hit with a thick book. When my eyelids finally obeyed, I saw a flash of red—my red wedding robe—and two men looming over me. They...
1 I had been awake at the lab for four nights straight, eyes glued to numbers until the spreadsheets blurred. I remember my mentor tapping my shoulder and saying, "Go rest. I'll watch the data." "I can do it," I said. "Just another hour." When I shut my eyes, the whir of machines turned into wind. When I opened them, the fluorescent lab was gone. A carved wooden screen and paper lanterns took its place. I sat on a futon in a room that smelled of incense, not coolant. My hands were tied...
