Quick reads you can finish in 10-30 minutes
Found 1964 short novels
I remember the first time I drank too much and walked into his life like an unpaid debt. "You don't have to make this harder than it is," someone purred from the booth, voice lacquered sweet. The woman laughed like a bell and leaned close to a man whose face I already knew too well. "Who told you he'd be kind?" I said when I stepped through the door. "Elina?" A dozen heads turned at once. "Is that—" "Robert," I said, and the room quieted like a curtain falling. He rose as if...
I spat a taste of iron and pushed my face up from the wet dirt. "Is she dead?" someone hissed, close by. "Dead," a high voice said, like a knife. "Good riddance." I felt the boot. Pain slammed my ribs. I did not want to move. I could not move. My whole skin felt like it had been ground and burned. "Leave her," the voice said. "If anyone asks, we never saw her." They left. Footsteps faded. Leaves brushed each other. The forest smelled old and wet and wrong. I blinked. Air was...
I opened my eyes to birdsong and clouds that looked like cotton. For a second I thought I was still in the hospital, because I had just come out of surgery. I blinked. The air smelled of wood smoke and river mud. My head ached. I pushed myself up. My white coat was gone. Instead I wore a long dress with wide sleeves that nearly tripped me. My glasses were gone, too. I touched my nose. My sight was sharp, clearer than ever. I thought, I must be dreaming. A child’s scream cut the air. I ran...
I: "Father wants me to go in my sister’s place." "Do you mean—into the palace?" I asked, and heard the hope in my own voice before I could bury it in a sensible face. "Elliot says it will secure the house," my eldest sister Juliana had told me when she handed along the letter. "It could be a better life. Think of it—no more worrying over empty bowls." "I'll do it." I said it fast, the kind of quick promise the poor make to themselves and then work the rest of their life to prove...
I wake to heat pressing its face against our windows. The town of Chuanhe is a wide, slow mouth of sun and asphalt. I sit on the low wooden stool, my hands in soapy water, and the wind from the road sweeps hot dust across the yard. Sweat runs down my temple. The metal sink gathers steam like a skillet. "Don't dawdle," my mother says from the front of the counter. Her voice is steady as always. She is in the small kitchen, feet barely touching the floor, and she peels garlic with a speed I...
"Kill her!" "I won't die for you," I said, and the sky answered. My hair burned like blood. My dress was the last red I owned. The air around the old palace gate shuddered as if it could not hold me and my choice at the same time. "You'll beg," someone shouted from the ranks. "I already begged," I told them. "That was enough." They were a sea of teeth and spears. They wanted the monster crowned by storybooks. They wanted the woman with the red dress and the white fox memory to be...
I never imagined the night a hospital called would be the hinge that flipped my life inside out. "Sebastian's in emergency," the nurse said. "A muscle rupture. He needs surgery." "He's supposed to be on a business trip," I said, because I needed something sensible to hang onto. "Sign here," she answered, and pushed a consent form across the plastic counter. I drove through a winter night that tasted like glass. My hands shook so badly I almost missed a turn. Sebastian Vasquez and I...
I was in line to get a swab when I realized the volunteer man doing samples was my ex. He pushed the swab deep and steady. I bit the inside of my cheek and kept my eyes forward. "Too deep! Lighter, please," I whispered, because dignity still mattered even in a mask. The volunteer smiled in a way that used to be familiar. "Deep?" he drawled. He snapped the swab clean in the tube with a little flourish. He glanced at the handsome guy waiting behind me and cocked an eyebrow. "New...
"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 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 don’t want the house. I want the last two months to be calm.” I said it like a fact, like ordering a cup of tea. “Calm?” Callahan Carvalho laughed and put his hand on the piano lid. “You say calm and then you glue yourself to every little thing that can go wrong.” I closed my eyes. “We agreed to keep the year polite. No scenes. No shouting in front of the parents. Buy-and-sell done after New Year.” “You sound like a lawyer,” he said. “Not my wife.” “You sound like a man who...
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...
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 learned to hold my breath when my family talked about my brother as if he were the only important child in the house. “Penn will go to a top high school for sure,” Dad crowed at the family dinner, patting the boy on the head with pride like he was a prize calf. “Three thousand a month is nothing," Mom chimed. "Girls never do as well. Look at other families — their daughters can’t even hold a job.” I smiled at the sink while the plates steamed and the words boiled in me. I rinsed a...
I died in year five of the collapse. I thought it would be the end. Then I woke up three months before the storm began again. "I opened my eyes and I was back," I said out loud in the empty kitchen. "This time, nothing gets to me by surprise." My name is Fatima Leroy. The jade pendant at my throat had been my grandmother's. In my last life, a streak of my own blood revealed a space inside it—small at first, but safe. I remembered how it had saved me. I remembered the rules of that space,...
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...
They shoved microphones at my face like hungry bees. I let them buzz. "Miss Laurent," a man with a camera said, "what do you say to people calling you spoiled, fake, unworthy of the industry?" "I say," I answered, and my voice was steady like a knife, "you don't get to rewrite my life with three clips and a rumor." "Oh come on, you know the videos—" a reporter barked. "You cut them," I said. "You chose what to air." I smiled. "Now, can we make space? People might get hurt if someone...
I still remember the ceramic ocarina he brought me the day he returned from the frontier. "Charlotte," he said, handing it to me with a quiet smile, "play this when you miss home. The soldiers play it to send memories over the wind." I touched the cool clay and thought of ten-year-old promises. I said, "I will wait." He left for three years. He came back with a different chest and a different light in his eyes. He came back with a memory that was not mine. On our wedding night he...
I put the photo up for five minutes, then went to bed. "You're going to regret posting that," Hattie texted before I even opened my eyes. "Why?" I typed back, blinking at the sunlight. "It's just a picture with Leon." "Because the internet is hungry," she sent, with a laughing emoji. "Also, don't be surprised if you get weird comments. People are hungry for drama." I laughed and left my phone on the desk. We had a quiet morning—lectures, coffee, the little rituals that had made the...
My son arrived at my door like a salesman with a mission and a fat, foolish grin. "Mom," Max said, breathless as if he'd been rehearsing this speech for weeks, "I don't want to struggle anymore. I'm going to be a live-in son-in-law." "A live-in what?" I set the kettle down so hard the water hid its shock in a hiss. "At Margarita's," Max explained, proud as a man with a brand-new watch. "Her family is rich. She wants me. I'm marrying her. I can't help you take care of you anymore." He...
