Quick reads you can finish in 10-30 minutes
Found 1964 short novels
I woke because a child screamed, "Don't eat my sister!" I sat up in a tangle of roots and cold. The moon pinched through the branches. My hands were small, my clothes coarse. I blinked, tasted iron, and remembered nothing of the farm and quiet life I'd planned. "Amelia?" a boy breathed. "Amelia, you're awake." I looked at the boy. He was five, all knobbled knees and trust. He wore torn sleeves and a bravery that did not belong to the place. I realized then my voice could come from this...
I remember the color of the night when the palace told me that the Empress had burned. It was the kind of cold that made breath into thin glass; the hall candles were low and watery. When I slipped into the audience chamber, I found my brother, Emperor Daxton Braun, bent over piles of red ink and seals like a man trying to hold together a map whose rivers were already wrong. "She burned herself?" I asked, because the rumor in my chest wanted to be named. "She burned," he said without...
I named every camera. I sat in the dark room and gave each of the thirteen lenses a small human name so I could feel less like an observer and more like an owner. Camera One watched the front door. Camera Two watched the hallway. Camera Three watched the living room from a vase of fake orchids. Camera Seven was tucked into the frame of the full-length mirror in her bedroom. All of them fed to my wall of screens, and the wall of screens fed me Everlee. "I like watching her when she thinks...
I told myself I would not panic. I told myself every rational thing a man who just lost the map to his life would tell himself: breathe, think, act. But the heat in Chongqing that July stuck to my skin like a wet sleeve, and everything else — the missed calls, the blocked messages, the damp prints of her thumb on my memory — felt like oil on my chest. "Mateo, tell me, are you all right?" my roommate back at school used to call me by my last name like it was a shield. But right then I was...
I found the camera when an electric toothbrush wouldn't charge. "I thought the outlet was faulty," I said out loud to the empty apartment, "and then I found that tiny dot." The dot was no bigger than a fingernail. It sat inside the bathroom outlet like a quiet eye. I pulled the charger out, and the world tilted. "I've been watched," I whispered. "All of this time." I remember the smell of detergent from the towels, the faint steam clinging to the mirror, and my knees going soft. I...
They say you should never insult a god. I did it at three in the morning while nursing instant noodles and a Netflix hangover. I was bored, single, and fed up with everyone around me celebrating someone else's rings and photos. So I muttered into the dark, loud enough to wake my own echo: "Matchmakers and fate—what a joke. If there's a Matchmaker, he can come find me. I dare him." I meant it as a rant. I didn't expect anything to answer. "Do you like being daring?" a voice asked in my...
I never liked being the loudest person in a room, but I am loud enough when it comes to what is mine. "Don't look at me like that," I told the girl sprawled on the bed when she tossed my suitcase and my shirts into the bin. "Those dresses? Those are mine." She sat up, game controller in hand, and blinked. "Who cares? They're just clothes." "I care." My voice was flat. "You owe me an explanation." "Explain what? Maybe you're jealous," she sneered, not bothering to stand. Lisa Bonilla...
I remember the thunder the night my son stopped breathing. "I can't—" I tried to hold him upright, whispering nonsense that sounded like a spell. "Elias, don't go. Elias, don't go." "Bring David!" I screamed until my throat tore. People rushed, lantern light cutting the rain into sharp knives. "He must come," I begged the eunuchs. "Go—now!" They ran and did not return with him. They returned with David Armstrong with someone else in his arms—Emerie Espinoza, pale as moonlight, her...
I spent eighteen years inside the stone-cool arms of a monastery. When I walked back into the capital as a princess, the world split along the seam of my return. Some people reached for me like a sun-starved thing, others shrank as if my shadow might bite. My mother, the Empress, apologized at court and promised me one thing in front of everyone: one wish would be granted. I looked until I could no longer keep the smile off my face, pointed through the crowd, and said, "Make Eliot Marino my...
I remember the first night Viktor Bishop bent over my sleeping head and spoke like thunder that smelled of summer rain. "Journey," he said, and his voice was both rough and gentle, "it is time." I blinked. My small hands were curled on the blanket. The pearl at my throat—my little companion—glowed like a dropped star. "Papa?" I asked, although I did not know how to call a being like him papa. He was older than all the sky. "Yes," he said. "You are ready to go into another little...
"I dropped the newspaper and fell to the ground." I blinked hard and tasted metal. People walked past like I was a stain on the sidewalk. "Miss Kennedy, your luggage—" a man in a maid's outfit held a small case and backed away. "No," I said. My voice was thin. "You're lying." He handed me the paper anyway. "Read it," he said. "You will understand." I did. The headline hit me like a fist. "'Dylan Marques' drunk driver found guilty. Entire Koenig family in crash—no...
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...
The scalpel bit into my chest like a cold, indifferent promise. Blood painted the white sheet a furious red. I watched my own ribs open, listened to a voice that was not mine whispering a name into the hollow of the operating room. "Ezekiel," the man at the table said, as if the name could stitch together what he had torn apart. "I give you the kidney. Wake up, please." I opened my eyes to bright, clinical white, and a system's voice—thin, mechanical, intolerant of ordinary pity—filled my...
I was eleven when the first trumpet sounded for my family and the first name was carved into the earth. “My daughter,” my mother whispered then, pressing my cheek with a palm that smelled of tea and smoke. “Keep your hands clean. Keep your head clear. We serve because we must.” “I will,” I said, because children promise what they cannot imagine breaking. Years later, I learned how much a promise can be taxed, and how thin a palace’s mercy can be. “You must come in, Hera,” Lucy said...
I am Elaina Sherman. "I saw them," I told myself like an accusation. "I saw them together." They were the two people who had built the map of my life—Atlas Green and I used to joke that maps led to treasure; Annabelle Chang and Carter Malik were part of my coastline, my safe harbor. Now that coastline had been cut by a jagged reef. "I can't believe she would do this," I said out loud to the empty room, because speaking softened the ache a little. "You have to decide," Atlas told me...
I woke up to the smell of old timber and soot. "You're alive," the old woman said, voice the sound of someone surprised by small miracles. "I—where am I?" I croaked, tasting dust and something sweet on the air. "This is my house. Sit, child." She propped a bowl of thin porridge under my nose. "Eat before you faint." I gulped the porridge like it might vanish. My head spun. Modern images—an embroidered ribbon on my wrist, a racing car's headlight—folded into something older, grainy...
I did something nobody expected: I took my brother's Maybach keys and sat in the leather seat. "Get out," he had said on the phone. "No, you get out," I texted back silently. When the dorm gossip started, my roommates turned on me fast and loud. I screenshot the first message and sent it to my brother. "Don't be shameless, stealing other people's men," one of them wrote. "You're making this a drama?" I showed Desmond the screenshot. He replied with a string of emojis and a single...
I was ten the first time someone called me anything but "the runt" or "little pest." My name was a sound, a silly syllable adults used when no one else was near: "Janessa," they never said it, so I said "I" and the house listened. "Don't go down there," Wilma warned as she tightened my sleeve. "I want to see her," I whispered. "Don't say that name," Wilma spat. "She killed people." "Who?" I asked, voice small as a mouse. "She," Wilma said, and her face went hard like a rock....
"I woke up because someone pushed me." I slammed my eyes open and my heart jumped into my throat. My hand met cool sheets, then warm skin. My fingers froze. "Who are you?" I whispered. A man rolled over. He didn't look at me. He breathed like he was sleeping. The room smelled like cigarette smoke and expensive soap. "I—" I stopped. My mouth was dry. I sat up and saw the blanket slip away. I was naked under it. "Oh my God," I said. "What happened last night?" He yawned and...
"I ripped the veil off and threw it at his polished shoes." "I thought you loved me," I said, and my voice did not sound like mine. "Forbes," I had called him that for years. Forbes West stood there in his wedding suit, flawless, and his eyes were clean of any warmth. "Why?" I asked again. He looked at me like he was reading a script. "Therese, falling from heaven to hell hurts, doesn't it?" I should have hit him. I should have run. Instead I let the world tilt and let the guards...
