Quick reads you can finish in 10-30 minutes
Found 1964 short novels
"Please, please, save my father," I begged, my forehead pressed to the ICU glass. I could see his hand twitch under the blankets. Machines were loud and red. I felt small and empty. "Blakely," Xander Black said behind me, his voice flat as steel. "Look at him." He shoved my head so hard my lips left a smear on the glass. "He used my mother," Xander spat at the old man on the bed. "He lied. He let her drown and blamed her. You think I won't make them pay?" My father tried to...
I woke up drenched in a memory I had lived again and again. "I dreamed it again," I told no one in particular as I sat on the worn couch. "He loved her in the dream. He took everything." "My lady, the rent—" Joann Carlson, my assistant, hissed into the phone with the landlord. "They say if we don't pay today—" "Okay," I said, and I put on sunglasses. "Then go pay it. I'll be fine." Joann's voice trembled. "You can't just—" "I know what I am," I said. "I'm Genesis Campbell. I know...
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 tasted it and I laughed out loud," I said, lifting the wooden ladle for Ezekiel to try. "You like it?" Ezekiel Campos blinked at me over the steam. "You made this?" "Me and the whole mess at home," I said. "Try it. Tell me if I priced it too high." Ezekiel put the spoon to his lips. He chewed once, then twice. He set the spoon down, eyes bright. "This is... honest," he said. "People will pay for honest. How many jars do you have?" "We've got two full jars today and a half a...
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...
When I first filled out the family info form, I only did what my dad told me. "My parents are coal miners," I wrote, because Dad said so. "Why?" my roommate Isabelle asked when she saw it. "Because Dad says it's safer to be quiet," I said. "He thinks people shouldn't show off." "That sounds weird," Isabelle said. "But okay." A week later, our year counselor, Kingston Berg, read aloud a list at the grade meeting. "Students on this list come to my office this afternoon with...
I was twelve years older than him. I told myself, "If only one of us can live, it must be me." I said it out loud in my head so many times that the words became a shield. "Do you want to go catch crickets?" Julissa's child tugged at her skirt and looked at me. He was small, bright-eyed, and when he smiled it was like a crack of sun through winter clouds. "Yes," I said. "Come with me." I did not know why I offered. I only knew a chessboard took my attention, but children and animals broke...
I am Gustav Duncan. I became a policeman because of her. "I want to know everything again," I said the afternoon Dixie Boehm brought me a cigarette and a photocopy of the painting. "Everything?" Dixie laughed and then pinched the cigarette out of my hand like she was taking a stubborn idea away. "You know I paint what I see. I don't tidy up truth." "I know," I said. "But the truth is a dangerous thing to leave alone." Dixie Boehm's painting was called Red Dress. It had made people...
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...
"You missed so much," Drake said, shoving my name into his phone like it was a prize. I looked up from the lab gate and smiled without meaning to. "What did I miss?" "You'll see," Drake replied. "Heard a whole class went quiet. The new substitute? Wow." "Substitute who?" I asked, and felt them all watching me like a minor scandal. Drake laughed. "You're the guest star, Jovie." I didn't answer. I kept my stride and pushed open the lecture hall door. The room smelled of chalk and...
"I'll toss one more," I said, and I did. "Please, sir, anything," came the rasping chorus from below the second-story window. I lifted the loaf like it was nothing and watched the crowd turn, dull eyes bright for a second. Jennifer had already started: the cloth bag, the pieces of dried meat, the white buns tossed like coins. Colin and Aaron stood at the cart, heavy and fast, moving what we needed to move. "Give us your best face," I told the crowd and winked. "Don't hurt—" someone...
I was born in the mountain, and for as long as I can remember my blood tasted dirty to me. "I told you," my grandmother would say, tapping the table with a nail, "that woman was trouble from the start. When she was with child she beat her own belly. Better to chain her than let her loose." "Chain her," my father would grunt, spitting tobacco into the dirt, and the world inside our valley held to that rule like iron. "Why is she chained?" I once asked, when I was small enough to still...
I remember the orange bottle first. "Do you know whose bottle this is?" my mother asked in the living room, waving a half-empty orange drink like it was a trophy. "It's Falcon's," my brother said without looking up from his toy. "My private one." "Of course it's Falcon's." Valeria Neal smiled at him as if he were the only sun in the house. "Justine, don't drink his things. You know better." "I was thirsty," I said. "You know better," she repeated, and the words landed like a lid...
I stood on the cracked porch and told the woman in the blue smock, "I'm Mila's roommate. The counselor asked me to check on her." The cleaner blinked. "Mila's not seeing anyone. She—" "I'll just say hello," I said. She hesitated, then the front door swung wider. A heavy man in a worn coat came into view. He stared at me for a long, strange second like a man looking for a ghost. "You're—" he began, throat working. "You're Fang Xueyue's daughter, aren't you?" I smiled the simplest...
I break the water and cough my first ragged breath. "Where am I?" I say. A cold boat of panic pushes through my chest. I wipe river water off my face and stare at my hands. They are smooth, not scarred like the hands that dug traps and handled venom in the valley where I grew up. Memories slam in like a stampede. I died. Then I woke up inside someone named An Mengqing. She is the rich daughter of a top family in the capital. She married a man named Landon Bruno — the city’s coldest...
I am Leanna Corbett. People know me by the way I write love that hurts and heals; they know me by the pale photos and the quiet interviews. I am the kind of writer whose life reads like a set piece—always measured, always collected. I have made a career of being a vessel: I take other people's pain, braid it into sentences, and sell the ache back to readers. That was my art and my armor. "People call you cold," Quinn Patterson said once at a café, stirring his coffee like it was a medical...
"I can't lie," I told the room full of microphones. "I have someone I like." "Who is it?" the reporters shouted like a small wave. "It's Evan," I said. "Wait—Evan Williams?" one woman asked, her pen stabbing the air. "Yes," I said. They screamed the rest themselves. The headlines did the work for them. Overnight my name climbed to the top of every trending list. Someone clipped the moment, looped it, and added a chorus of speculations. I sat in my car outside the press center and...
The river smelled like cold iron that evening. I knew it because the adult in me—who had lived under fluorescent office lights and commuter trains—recognized it in a childish body. I tasted river water and panic, and then a stranger's arms. "Get her up! Hurry!" someone shouted. A broad-shouldered man pulled me from the current and set me on the riverbank. My lungs forgot how to work for a beat; then they remembered. I hacked and coughed and opened my eyes to a ring of faces and...
"I told you he would come back," Magdalena said into the phone like she was delivering weather. "And he did, didn't he?" "I know," I said. "He came back with a kid." Magdalena's laugh crackled through the line. "Are you okay?" "I am more than okay," I lied, and smiled because smiling kept the room steady. I kept my hand on the stack of papers on my desk—property contracts, investment memos, projections. They were real. They were mine. The man who once called himself my boyfriend...
I don't know why the police arrived right when Gerard and I were at the loudest point of our fight. "You two—what's going on here?" the woman who barged into my apartment asked first. Short hair, neat uniform, face that would be soft in other lights but not now. Her name tag read Juliana Garcia. "I'm telling you, he's trying to kill me," I said. My voice was raw from yelling. "He switched my pills. He gave me things that thin my blood. He wanted me gone." "I only saw you two arguing...
