Quick reads you can finish in 10-30 minutes
Found 1964 short novels
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...
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 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...
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 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 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 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...
I saw them through the doorway before I could think. "Who do you love more, Henrik… me or Lenora?" a woman's voice purred like honey. "Baby, of course I love you the most," Henrik Blevins breathed. His voice was rough, broken, sweaty. He clutched Lenora Santiago like he had been punched by a fever. I stood frozen in my white shirt and floral skirt. My heels clicked against the hallway tile and sounded so loud it broke the room's rhythm. My fiancé lay across the bed, his face flushed...
"I hate all of this," I said, more to the plate of cold noodles than to anyone else. "You're twenty-three," my mother said, voice thin with the practiced worry of someone who never stops worrying. "You can't wait forever. Go on one date. Just one." "I work," I said. "I live. I am not a timeline." "Then I'll make the timeline." She laid a phone on the table like a land mine. "I've put your picture up online. Someone messaged. Go meet him." "I didn't say yes to anything." "And you...
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 want him," I said, and the whole room turned toward me. People froze. Glass chimed. A man laughed like it was a joke. Then Cooper Jordan looked up from his birthday seat, slow and calm, and his smile sharpened. "Katharine Charles," he said, with that half-amused, half-mean tone he used to have even in high school. "You really know how to make an entrance." "Where is my brother?" I asked. My voice was small and fierce. Rain had soaked my hair. My palms were cold under my coat....
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...
When I woke up in that life, I opened my eyes to a living room that smelled like old money and jasmine. I blinked and found a pearl necklace on the side table, a framed photo of my late husband, and a ten-year-old shadow perched at the foot of the couch. "Mom," she said, small and steady. "Don't be sad. When I grow up, I'll take care of you like Dad did." I laughed, then cried. "All right," I said. "From now on, I'm your real mom." My name is Marcella Bridges. I was thirty-five, wore...
"I am Jaylah Cherry," I said when they first asked my name in the East Court. "I am Canon David's wife." "You're his white moon," Canon David whispered, fingers warm around my hand. "You will be—" "I will be with you," I finished for him. "If you go, I go." "You won't resent me?" he asked once, the day before the throne was publicly sealed and Kadence Brown was named Empress. "I won't resent you," I answered with a smile that fixed the hurt somewhere below my ribs. "What you want, 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 didn't expect weddings to mean anything to me. "I do," Cedar Eaton said, sliding the ring toward my finger. "Wait—" The hall held its breath. My breath stuck halfway. The chapel doors burst open. "Dad!" a small voice cried. Cedar's hand froze. The ring stopped half on my knuckle. I saw him, the perfect groom, turn like someone had pulled a string. A woman stood in the doorway, immaculate, mascara dark as guilt. She held a small boy by the hand. His hair stuck up like he had...
"They hit me again." "I felt the heel sink into my ribs, heard a wet crack, and tasted dust." "Why are you doing this to me?" I spat, voice small and sharp. "Because you are the third daughter," Deborah Bass said with a grin that had killed more than smiles. "Because the house likes clean work." "They laughed," I told the empty courtyard. "They kicked me and called me trash. They took my food, my clothes, my name." "Stop whining," a tinny voice cut inside my head. "Binding...
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 learned to pack my life into a frame and a caption. I learned to make two minutes of sky feel like forever. I learned to fix engines on paper and compose sunsets in post. I did all of that because I wanted to be a person who could choose things for herself. "My vlog intro," I said into the little recorder, "MES524—first class, king-size, watch the lights above the clouds—one day I'll lie there with my someone and press record on an aurora." The flight to Shanghai felt ordinary until the...
I was supposed to marry once—once, in the simple way children bind futures with ink and promise. "You will be his," my mother had whispered long ago. "And he will be ours." "It will be all right," Fabian had said the day he asked my hand in that small, reckless way boys do in summer. He had been wearing the metal of a young guard then, sunlight catching the edge of his helmet. His voice had been steady. "Arianna, will you trust me?" "I will," I told him. I was twelve. The word was...
