Quick reads you can finish in 10-30 minutes
Found 1964 short novels
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 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 found the ATM receipt inside a soap box. "I knew it," I said, my voice so small it barely filled the kitchen. "Found what?" Ross James looked up from his laptop like a man who had never been forced to finish anything on time. "The bank withdrawal. The ATM receipt—with our card number on it." I held the paper out like proof of some small miracle. He didn't take it. He didn't even blink. "We need to talk about this later." Later had been a soft promise for months in our house....
I called him my little sun. He called me his wife like it was the only private joke left between us. "I like you a lot," I told Wyatt the first time I saw him. He smiled, and I wrote him a note in my phone: "Little Sun." He fit around my life like a shadow at noon. He knew my coffee order, my guilty snack drawer, the exact way I tossed my hair when I was thinking. We brushed our teeth together in the morning and he would reach over and mess up my hair with wet fingers. "Breakfast?"...
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...
I woke with my ribs seized by a black, pressing weight and the taste of iron in my mouth. "Hold my hand," a small voice said. "Don't fuss." The voice belonged to a boy no older than a child, darting candlelight across lacquered wood. He looked at me like someone who had been rehearsing for the exact moment I'd wake. "Who—" I tried. The chest around me was too tight. The cloth against my skin was smooth and soaked with sweat. When I forced my knees to straighten the lid above me opened...
I remember the little recorder like a secret pebble in my palm. "Isabella," Minerva said softly the day she first packed her grainy scarf, "you mustn't let them see how hurt you are." "I won't," I told her, voice small and steady. "I'll be quiet." "Quiet doesn't mean powerless," she answered, squeezing my shoulder. The house smelled of soap and old cigarettes. Damian Blake had always been a man who smelled of work—concrete dust, rolled up blueprints, the faint sting of sweat. When...
I woke to a smell like wet clay and old oil, and a hand like a burl of tree bark groping my cheek. "She's got good skin," a woman's voice rumbled at the foot of the bed. "Pretty face. Shame about the frame—no shape to her at all. Nobody'll pay for a lump like that." "Don't talk like that!" a second voice hissed, wheedling. "Look at her, Gregory—white as milk. If you ask me, she'll fetch more. Five taels is kind." "Five taels," muttered a third, younger voice. "I'll give five and a half...
"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 woke up before dawn as I always did, carrying the broom that was my badge and my burden. I am Chauncey Song. I am sixteen, thin, and I have a small clay doll tucked in my shirt—Teresa Burnett made it for me before I left home—and a letter from home that smells like river smoke and boiled greens. “I will not give up,” I told myself, breath fogging the valley air. “I will keep going.” Someone laughed behind me as I stepped into the path. “Look, isn’t that the former outer disciple?” a...
I still remember the damp smell of the ditch where my life began: wet earth, old blood, and the hurried, broken steps of two people who decided I was too small a thing to keep. They left me in a ragged bundle and went away like shame on two legs. "Leave her," the woman said. "There is no place for a babe." "Better the dead eat her than the living starve," the man answered. I was not human then—at least, I did not know what words meant—but I knew hands. I knew heat. When a big gray hand...
"I don't let civilians near the front," Grey said the first time he caught me with a camera. I dropped my notebook. "You can't order me around," I snapped back, but my voice shook. He didn't smile. He never smiled. He stood in his full kit like a dark statue, snow on his shoulders, eyes colder than the wind. "You're my niece. Go home." "You're my uncle," I reminded him. "Not my commander." He folded his arms. "Same thing here." I swallowed and did the adult thing: I signed the...
I am Giulia Reid. I was, for a long time, a much-feared widow in the valley town of Yunxi. "How many husbands have you had?" the butcher's wife hissed once, across a courtyard when she thought no official would hear. "Five," I told her. "Five perfectly timed inheritances." The truth was blunt and small: I had money, acres, a yard large enough to plant silence. I had a gold tea set that pleased no one but myself, and a mattress wide enough to sleep without dreaming. "You're a witch,"...
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 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 remember the first sentence Hernando said in the doorway as if it still had the dust of that morning on it. "Elijah, I heard you have a car—can we borrow it?" I closed the glass door before his second breath, and the word came out hard and polite: "Sorry. Fuel is scarce. We don't lend the car." Hernando put a hand to the glass and did not pull away. He looked too thin to be lying. "It's not renting a car. It's an alliance," he said. "There's a little market hidden in the Lishui...
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....
1977 summer had the smell of hot tar and boiled corn. I opened my eyes to a court yard buzzing with voices that wanted me dead or wanted me owned; they were not the same thing here, and both hurt. “Get away from her!” a man snarled—no, that was not how it began. The loud voice came like a hammer blow, rough and greedy. “You old witch, step aside!” another voice jeered. I blinked. Dirt in the mouth, the taste of pond water still in my teeth. I forced myself up and saw a hulking man...
