Quick reads you can finish in 10-30 minutes
Found 1964 short novels
I liked to think I knew how to read people. I had worked five years in administration in Beijing, handled office politics and paperwork, and believed I could tell truth from charm. I thought I married a man who believed in logic and fairness. His name was Alexander Cannon, and I loved him. I loved how he listened, how he consulted me when he bought small things, how he joked with me in that soft, earnest way. I called him my reasoning partner, my little philosopher. But one month after our...
I wake up to a pain I know too intimately and yet never lived to remember. "Ah—this hurts," I say, and the world smells like antiseptic and iron and the thin sweet of sleeping medicine. "You're back," someone says. A man towers at the doorway like a dark cliff against the pale winter light. He looks old to me, like someone who has lived with too many things he doesn't say. Up close, his face is not cruel. It is precise, like a tool kept clean. He is River Farley. "I… am I dead?" I...
They asked my name like it was a formality. "Name?" a recorder clicked. "Noah Reyes," I said. "Age?" "Twenty-four." "Gender?" "Male." The questions kept coming, and the room kept shrinking around me. The interview room smelled faintly of coffee gone cold and institutional bleach. I had no idea why I was there for three days straight. I kept replaying the last week in my head: the fieldwork, the professor's lecture I once sat through in college, the elevator button I was...
I found her because I was bored. "I want to eat here," the post read, playful and small, "@Francisco Donnelly, take me." It was eight years old. I kept scrolling. "I remember this." "Same," someone commented, with heart emojis. I breathed in, slow. I should not have opened that account. But I did. I clicked the little profile, and a string of old pictures fell into my lap—milk tea, hand-held cameras, a man smiling like sun through glass. "I didn't know," I said aloud to...
"I don't hear you answering, Antonia! Antonia, are you even alive?" someone kept calling. I opened my eyes to sunlight that smelled of smoke and damp straw. My head felt like it had been stamped on. I touched the back of my skull and my fingers came away with a smear of dried blood and a strip of coarse cloth tied around a wound. "This can't be the office," I said to myself before I remembered my mouth couldn't say it out loud because no one else was in the small room. The room looked...
I crawled out of a wasteland on the third day and tasted the sun like a threat. "Are you alive?" a voice asked, and for a second I thought the world had decided to answer me back. I blinked and the town looked like something stitched together from other people's lives—tall houses, odd round holes, nests with awnings. The air smelled less like rot and more like... waiting. "I—" I fumbled for words. "I don't know where I am." "You look like you crawled from the pit," the man at the...
I woke to a sound I didn't recognize: a short, clean electronic chime that kept repeating. "Do you hear that?" I whispered in the dark. "Mm?" Marcus Castle's voice floated up from below. "Sleep." "I heard a sound." I tried to keep my voice light. "A computer?" "It's probably the oven timer. Don't worry." He laughed, like he always laughed when he wanted to make me stop worrying. I swung my legs off the bed and padded across the carpet. The laptop on his desk was alive with little...
I never thought a cat could be the beginning of a war. "This is my house," I said, white-knuckled and breathing like I'd just run a sprint. "You get your feet off her, Tucker." He didn't move. He had one sneaker on Drumstick's tail and the other on her head, and the sound she made cut through the apartment like a siren. "Get off!" I pushed him. My voice was thin with pull and anger. "What are you doing?" Tucker Schumacher blinked up at me like he had been caught stealing candy. "She...
I never meant to be a stubborn disaster. I never meant to spend nights eating and sleeping in a loop, waking up only to eat again. But when you are trying to rewrite an ending written by someone else, you pick your bad habits like old tools and hold them tight. "It’s late," Tucker said, squinting when he found me roaming the courtyard. "You need sleep." "I don't need much," I said, though I did. "Menacing the moon with you sounds better than the bed." He laughed. "Menace the moon? Is...
I didn't open my eyes because of light. I opened them because my cheeks hurt from someone else's face, and the candle made my throat taste like old wine. "Where am I?" I croaked. My mouth was dry; the world tilted. I sat up and saw jars—big brown jars full of something that smelled like rotten fruit and anger. A man's shadow moved by the jars. He smelled of the same rot. "You finally woke," he said, voice ragged with drink. "Don't try to be clever." The hand that pushed me back had a...
I have woken up in other people's beds more times than I can count. "Sleep," Valentin Archer said the very first thing to me the first time he found me in that place where the moonlight never seemed to reach. "Sleep," he said every night after. "Sleep," he said like a prayer, like a command, like a lullaby that would bend my life into quiet curves until it broke. I don't like being told what to do. I especially don't like being told to sleep when I'm wide awake. "Sleep," he told me...
I remember the heat of the blade. "I did what I had to," Xavier said once, his voice flat as a ledger. "For her." He held the knife like a prize. The metal was hot enough that the handle burned his palm. He pressed it into my chest. I felt nothing where he touched. Nothing but a cold, stunned silence where my heart should have hammered. "You will not scream," he said. "I will do it cleanly." "Xavier—" I tried. The name came out as a prayer, not an accusation. He did not look at...
They said I had snakes in my belly like a bad story told to scare children. "You heard about Aurora?" two women passed by the alley, their voices high and thin. "What about Aurora?" I pretended not to listen. "She slept in the snake room after her period and—" one whispered with relish. "They found tiny snakes in her stomach." "Ridiculous," the other scoffed, but their steps left me cold anyway. I come from Pan-Snake Town, a place named for the coils of rock and the animals we...
I still remember the voice the first time he asked me out like a dare. "Will you come with me?" Cruz asked, the rasp of his voice lazy and amused. People laughed behind him. "Qi—" someone started. "Cut it out," Louis Serra called, grinning. He pushed at Cruz's shoulder, and the joke turned into a dare and the dare landed on me. "I'll go." I said it before my heart could tell me not to, and the room slipped sideways into something warm and dangerous. Cruz smoked as he...
"Don't leave me," he whispered once, in a courtyard of fireflies. "Please do not leave me." I remember saying it back to him in a different voice the night everything broke. "I give up on you." "Again: confirm, host, are you abandoning the book world?" The system's voice was flat. I lifted the sword and pressed it to my throat. Blood ran warm and thick. Liam Hudson watched, a look on his face that had always been a promise and a threat. I smiled the only smile I had left. "This...
I woke up gasping, my hand pressed hard to the place my dream had been stabbed. "You're okay," I told myself out loud, but my voice shook. The silk nightgown clung to me. The room around me was quiet. The dream had been too real—too sharp. I could still feel a blade, the wet sting, the smell of iron. My phone chimed. I looked at the screen. A string of symbols I knew by heart blinked bright. "Eleven, someone found who you asked for," the voice said when I answered. "Good," I...
My name is Indie Douglas. I tell this story in the first person, because I was in the center of it, and because I still hear the slap of the hotel plates and the click of that tiny tin of wedding favors in my head. "It was supposed to be simple," I told Nathan when he held my hand in the hospital waiting room. "Just family, a few friends. Nothing dramatic." Nathan Harris laughed and kissed my forehead. "Nothing dramatic has followed you yet. Give it time." We both smiled then, because...
I remember the gray morning over the Silva manor like a bruise. The house smelled of old money and colder things: silence, and someone else’s plans. “My sister, Helena,” Hans Brantley said, voice husky with the nicotine of a thousand excuses. “Whether you agree or not, today you marry Armando Vasseur’s man. You don’t have a choice.” I sat hold-straight on the leather couch like a statue carved to hold back too many storms. I did not cry. I did not beg. I kept my back straight and my eyes...
"I'll sing it. Right here. Right now." The words left my throat like a confession. My knees were raw from the pavement. The city lights blurred into halos and people’s faces were just dark shapes and flashes of phone screens. Logan Picard stood under the club canopy, a shadow inside a shadow, watching me as if I were an animal he had trained. "You will sing it," he said. "And you will beg for mercy while you sing." "Logan..." My voice cracked. "Please." He smiled like the verdict...
I was born into a house that fit too many people into too few square meters and too many dreams into too little time. My name is Mariah Blanc. I learned early that smallness can be ordinary and stubborn all at once: my skin was sallow, I stood a little shorter than most girls, I laughed with my whole mouth and showed the back teeth everyone pretended not to notice. And yet I had a hunger that made me put my palms to the sky and ask to be someone who could stand beneath a light and pretend to be...
