Quick reads you can finish in 10-30 minutes
Found 1964 short novels
I remember the night the five houses were listed in my name like a small, cruel joke. "I don't want to be apart anymore," Gage said the first night he moved in, and his fingers caught my wrist the way they always had—gentle, claiming, familiar. "Why did you give up your research spot?" I asked him, letting my voice sound casual though my heart wasn't. He'd been set to keep a scholarship and a study route at a top school, and he had walked away when the houses came through. It was the...
I was fourteen when everything I loved went down the road in pieces. "My parents are gone," I told the empty room for the first long night. "You must live for them, Dahlia." I promised them with my small, dry hands and a patchwork pillow. I kept that promise. I kept working the seed shop my parents left me. I kept the little house with Grandpa Garrett and Grandma Camilla. I kept eating cheap porridge and watching old war films on the cracked screen. I kept a stubborn small life. One...
I woke to the shape of accusation laid on a china saucer. “You pushed her into traffic, Athena. The video proves it,” a man's voice slammed like a palm on the tea table across from me. I looked up. My name in his mouth felt like someone else’s key in the lock of my skull. The screen on the table replayed a short clip: two women beside the road, one suddenly grabbing the other's hand — then a shove. Lights from oncoming cars blurred. The woman who shoved looked exactly like me. I...
I died at midnight. "I can't be seeing this," I said to the hallway that had been my home for three years. "Cade, how could you?" He didn't turn. The man I loved—Cade Reynolds—was tangled on the bed with someone whose laugh sounded like a treacherous bell. I had two tickets in my bag, a surprise planned, an entire life imagined. Instead, my fingers tightened on the suitcase handle until the leather creaked. "I gave you everything," I whispered to the empty street, to the night that...
"I need you to sound like me for three nights," Gemma said, voice low over the phone. "I can do it," I answered, keeping my spoon from clinking. "Promise me you won't blow it," she warned. "Promise," I said. "Good." She sent a voice clip. "He likes a soft, girlish tone. Sing a lullaby, hum a little—he won't tell." I practiced Gemma's cadence for a whole day and night. My twins, Everleigh and Addison, slept through my rehearsals. I hooked my work account, slipped into the...
When I was fifteen, Shane Cummings took my hand and promised me the moon. "I'll keep you safe," he said then, like a vow carved into bone. "Whatever comes, I won't leave you." I believed him the way children believe in tides. I believed him until the winter when the snow fell so hard it erased the world and showed me the shape of his lies. "I have to tell you something," I whispered into the sterile light of the clinic, clutching the pregnancy slip between my fingers. Shane didn't...
"I told you not to cry." "Who said I was crying?" I answered, voice small when I was sixteen and hungry. "You'll get warm food now," Mrs. Janelle Williamson said, wiping my hair back. "Thank you," I said, and I meant it more than any word I had for anyone. "They found you," she whispered. "They'll come for you." They did come. They came in polished shoes and careful faces. They called me "daugh—" then stopped. They looked at me, then at the chart the doctor handed...
This is my voice after three hundred years in a cold, narrow place. "I am Clara Ford," I tell the bead that holds my soul. "You still remember your name?" Finn Guerin—my son—asks me every night, and his voice vibrates the small pearl as if he can rouse a sleeping heart. He is the only warm thing left in a world that took my flesh away piece by piece. The prince, Clyde Ramos, came and took from me what made me whole. He dipped my scales in bowls, he drank the blood set aside for Phoenix...
I locked the old key in my palm and tasted the metal like a private promise. "I always wondered if you'd ever laugh," Denver said softly. "Do you mean at me or with me?" I asked. He smiled like sunlight through glass. "With you." I had told myself for two years that cold was simpler. I had practiced the look that shut people out. I had learned to keep my life tidy, to collect rents, to count rooms like small victories. "Landlord" was a comfortable dream: buy one apartment, then...
I woke up to beeping monitors and white that smelled like hospitals and lies. "Wake up, Gwen, are you okay?" Connie's voice fluttered like a small, nervous bird. "I feel like someone smashed a drum inside my head," I said. "You're pale. Someone call the doctor!" she cried. The doctor said, "We think it's a concussion. Some memories may be blurred." I let the words roll over me like cold water and then, like a needle, the memory of a list stabbed through all the fog: eighteen...
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 quit my job on a Tuesday and woke up the next morning feeling like a person who had just broken out of a tight suit of obligations. "I'll sleep for a month," I told myself, stretching on the couch. "No boss calls. No group chats. Just me, my couch, and bad drama on the screen." My apartment was tidy. Old enough to have the small comforts, new enough to not be crowded. One-twenty square meters—cozy by a single person's standard. The estate had been built a year ago; only a few units were...
I was sold into the mountains two years ago. My name is Denver Boone. I still say it to myself at night to keep my feet from sinking into whatever bed of shame I sleep on. "Denver, step out. Come on," Kingston Davidson would bark, and I would obey because obedience kept me alive for a day, for an hour. He kept me on a chain like a dog. "You belong here," Hedda Medina told me, morning after morning, her voice slick with faith. I learned to nod. I learned to measure pain. "I can help you,"...
I woke to cold water and a raw sting behind my eyes. I fought the pull down, lungs burning, and spat until the taste of river mud filled the air. When my head cleared there was a pale rectangle floating just above the rocks, half translucent and blinking slow. "Loading..." it said in the middle, then a progress bar crawled. I touched the water from my skirt and the moonlight made the surface glassy. My name in that life felt thin as tissue—someone else's memory stitched poorly to mine....
I woke up to the living room ringing with applause. "She got everything for her birthday!" "Isabella, come out and blow the candles!" I blinked at the ceiling, at the old phone on the desk, and at the calendar cracking a quiet lie: 2015. "This—" I said out loud to myself, and then to the room. "I'm back." "This is my chance," I whispered. "Julieta?" a small voice called from the hall. "Yes," I answered, sitting up. "I'm Julieta." Isabella Henry barreled into my room with...
"I need the healer in City A." I said it into the phone while I climbed out of the racing car, one hand on my suitcase. "Great. I'll come as soon as I'm done," my brother Carver said. "I said no," I replied coldly, and shut the door on him. I don't need pity. I don't need an escort. I need a cure. When I landed in A City, Dean Sanchez — my loyal driver-bodyguard — was waiting like a worried ghost. "Boss, you're finally here," he said. "Where's my place?" I asked, taking the...
I woke to the taste of iron and the memory of concrete pressing into my cheek. For a moment I could not tell whether I had died or been buried alive. The dark had a shape I could count on: it had held me for three years. "Do you remember me?" I whispered to the ceiling, to the rat-scratched stone, to whatever small part of me survived. My voice sounded like someone else's. A woman came then, her steps bright as bells. She crouched, lifted my chin with fingers I had loved once. "Look at...
1. The countdown read: seven days. "I dreamed about the dead again," I told the camera as I turned the light off. "It felt so real." I, Layne Cotton, had been a streamer since college. Night shifts, late naps. That evening I woke to a flash of memory like a warned alarm. I couldn't tell if it had been a dream or a premonition, but one detail stuck: a scandal about a celebrity, then a news spike, then a tag I did not expect — "rebirth" and "seven days." "Fans are going wild," I said to...
I never expected a moonlit cave to hand me the whole world. "I hear a baby," I said, bending closer to the dark, my voice small in the hollow. "You hearing things now, Miriam?" Dieter answered, rubbing his temple. "We've had no sleep for days." "I did," I insisted. "Listen." I moved forward. The sound came again, thin and tired. The earth smelled of smoke and travel, our cart's last grain of flour gone weeks ago, our shoes all split. I reached with both hands into the dark corner and...
I was seven the first time I almost died. "Stay with me," I croaked. "Ariya." She looked older than seven then, quiet as rain. "The spring has come," she said, and pushed a wet branch of spring begonia into my hands. "Where did you get this?" I whispered. My voice was small. The fever had hollowed me out. She smiled the way she always smiled—soft, steady. "I found it in a yard. I thought it would make you better." "I—" I tried to say thank you, but the words were stones in my...
