Quick reads you can finish in 10-30 minutes
Found 1964 short novels
They put my name on the giant banner and made the whole hotel smell like lilies and roasted meat. "I didn't ask for all this," I muttered, fingering the edge of the microphone. "Thank you, everyone." The applause washed over me like a warm current; the lights made my glasses glint. I tried to smile small. I tried to be the grateful, polite daughter everyone expected. "Indigo!" my mother called softly from the front row. "Say something about—" "Thank you," I said into the mic, and heard...
I was supposed to be preparing for university, but the summer opened like a jagged wound. "My parents are splitting up," I said once, flat and small, when a classmate asked. She blinked and pretended not to hear the rest. She didn't know what it had cost me: my father's drink bottles lined like soldiers on the living room table, my mother throwing herself at someone with the blunt courage of someone hungry for a new life. "Why would Mom do this?" I asked her over and over in my room, even...
I remember the night my bridal fan slipped from my hands and the room stayed suddenly too large. "You will live in the Eastern Palace, and there are ways to settle in," Jalen Archer said without looking. "If you need anything—food, clothing—ask Asami. She is kind." "I know," I answered. I said nothing about the sound of my home, the white poplars, the caravan bells of Yumen. I kept the fan folded in my lap and watched his sleeve leave the bed. I was fifteen; the prince and his wife had a son...
I woke to a sky that did not belong to me. "Abigail?" someone said. "Is that—" I opened my eyes to silk, to light, to a hall dressed for a wedding. Red banners streamed like rivers, and every face in the room was turned toward a pair on a dais. The man at the center wore the cold, familiar armor of Aarón Muller, but he wore joy—he wore it in a way I had never seen him wear anything. Beside him stood a woman with my eyes. "Slow," a voice called. "Hold it—" The master of ceremony...
I woke up to white light and no memory later than a childhood that stopped at ten. The hospital room smelled like disinfectant and boiled rice. My body felt foreign but safe enough. A woman sat in the plastic chair beside me like she had been waiting there forever. "Anna," she said when the nurse told her my name, and she took my hand like the word tied her to me. "Anna, forgive me, I've been so busy. I'm your mother." "Are you my mother?" I asked. I knew the syllables but not the weight...
I learn the shape of a lie by touching it. "You think you are set apart because you loved Evan Smirnov ten lives?" the whisperers say in the palace halls. "You're nothing but his passing trial," another adds. "When he returns to his station, he will marry Sigrid Andersen, the destined mate. Don't hope." I used to believe them. I used to believe the man who told me, with a silver-clear voice, "You are my mortal tribulation. It is your luck to have had me as your calamity." He said he...
“Give me the wild vegetables and eggs,” Brittany Brooks snapped, and I hugged my basket harder. “I need them for my mother and my brothers,” I said, and felt my voice wobble. “You fox and her brat don’t deserve food,” Brittany said, and grabbed. I ran. She shoved me. I fell. I remember the cliff, the dark, and the cold. Then a white flash and the sound of a phone I’d just bought in my other life humming in my hand. I opened my eyes to a low thatch ceiling, to a woman wiping...
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 won't leave me, right?" Griffin Alves' voice was small, like someone asking whether the sun would set tonight. I looked at him. His face was all too beautiful and all too dangerous. I had been with him since I was eighteen. I had been his maid, his night-keeper, the hand that smoothed his hair when nightmares tore at him. Four years of being his shadow. Four years of being paid to stay. "Griffin," I said softly, "I've always been here." He laughed a little, swallowed, then said,...
1. "I am a bastard," I said once to myself in the dark when I was five and had not yet learned how shame could be tuned into armor. "That's not a word you should know yet," my mother snapped, cursing the phone in her hand. "Call him again. Call until he comes." "Who's he?" the concierge asked once when she dragged me to a hotel with a nervous laugh and one of her usual schemes. "His name is Dempsey Cao," my mother answered, eyes shining with the fever of someone who'd convinced...
I remember the moment like a bad song stuck on repeat: a teddy-bear interface blinking at me and a stack of scripts that smelled of fate and mildew. “This is your first assignment,” the assistant squealed, its voice too bright for a government node. “After completion, your placement in the Stability Bureau will be decided.” “Start when?” I asked. “Group whatever. I only want merit.” Molly Duffy—my assigned auxiliary, a plush-faced AI in a bureaucratic shell—tilted her head. “You’ll need...
I remember the exact number on the paper before I remember the way my hand shook holding it. "Seven twenty-eight," I said aloud even though no one else needed to hear it. "You got seven twenty-eight?" The voice next to me sounded small and steady. "Yes." I looked up. Her smile was fragile and terrible and real. "Thank you." She shrugged. "You earned it." I had earned the score with two bodies pulling in the same direction. One of us had always tried to please. The other had learned...
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 remember the first time I thought money would fix everything. "Put the kettle on," I told her, like I always did. "I'll be back late." Genevieve tied the towel around her thin waist and smiled, the way she always smiled when she thought I was pleased. Her hands trembled a little when she lifted the lid. "Don't stay out too late," she said softly. "Business," I replied, because that was the shorthand for the nights I wasn't with her any more. She nodded, obedient as a child, as if...
I remember the hospital lights as if they were a city of stars collapsing. "You're awake," a voice said. "Can you hear me?" "Yes," I answered, but the mouth that moved was not mine. A nurse checked my pulse and smiled. "Weak, but stable. Family's on their way." I closed my eyes. The world didn't fit. My own name felt wrong in my throat. I had been a student admitted to the best university, prodigy status locked in the files back home. I had dreams, essays, competitions—my life...
I remember the pain first—the kind that stole the breath from me and left the world narrow as a candle flame. I remember hands, linen, and an impossible white overhead. I remember someone saying, "Hold on, push," and then someone else, clinical and cold, saying, "Prepare the defibrillator." "I can't—" I tried to speak. My voice came out as a thin rope of air. "You must," said a man at my ear. His voice was a soft river. He bent and poured warm water into my mouth as if life were simply...
The first time I died, my mouth tasted of iron and a thin, sweet wine. "I thought I'd feel fear," I told the empty air of my old bedchamber, once. "I did not." I am Giselle Stephens. I was an empress, and I died as an empress. "Look at us now," Hermione said across the low table, and her voice sounded like it had always sounded ― even when our lives were knives. "Two ghosts sharing a room." She smiled for the first time in years. It was cold and bright and almost reckless. "If we...
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 slipped in the mud and watched the hem of my new skirt tear. The road had betrayed me after the storm; the world was gray, and my patience thin. "Caitlin Vorobyov," I told myself, "do not act like a fool and fall again." Then I blinked and saw his back. He was all angles in black—lean, straight, moving like someone who belonged to wind and rope. I tried to stand properly. The skirt betrayed me again and I plopped on the wet ground. "Keep running, Miss Caitlin," he said without turning...
I hit the ground hard and tasted dust. "I think you broke something," a voice said close to my ear. I tried to scream. My mouth filled with someone's hand. I made a muffled noise. "Don't shout," the voice breathed. "If you make noise, I'll leave." I nodded like a puppet. He let go. I punched him. "Ow!" he said and actually sounded surprised instead of angry. My fist was soft. He caught it like catching a sparrow. "Stop," he said quietly. "Look." I blinked. I was in a...
