Quick reads you can finish in 10-30 minutes
Found 1964 short novels
I signed the contract because of the money. A million dollars for one risky, weird job — find a missing high school girl and bring whatever was left of her back to the world. It sounded straightforward. It wasn't. "Are you sure about this, Alayna?" Jameson Clark asked, pushing the file back and forth between his fingers like it was a hot plate. "I am," I said. "You know what they're saying." He leaned close enough that I smelled the clinic coffee on his breath. "That game fries brains....
"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...
I was supposed to be the proud daughter of a great family—Estrella Larsson, the eldest granddaughter of a chancellor, raised to be admired and married for honor. Instead I became the second household’s shadow: a side consort in the East Palace, expected to keep my head bowed and my mouth closed. "I don't understand why you look like that," Hailey said one afternoon, swatting at a pear. She was my brightest friend in the East Palace—Hailey Kozlov—who loved everything with a reckless, open...
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'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...
I woke up with the taste of rain and metal in my mouth, and for a terrible second I thought the roof had finally taken me. "Where am I?" I whispered, fingers fumbling the quilt as if it could stitch the night back into safety. Outside, the city was quiet at dawn, but my heart was not. My palms remembered a windless night, a rooftop, the sound of men's boots, and a hand that pushed. The memory slid away like someone drawing a curtain, but then the other memory came—the one I had begged not...
"I want this city to breathe again," she shouted, then ripped open her shirt. I froze on the leather chair and watched petals fly like an accident. Security moved like a blade. My assistant Eamon Reid looked at me, eyes wide, and mouthed, "What do we do?" "Let her," I said. Eamon didn't let her. He lunged forward and the scene became a bad movie: men in suits, a white mask on a young woman, a banner that said STOP THE FACTORY in felt-tip strokes, and a handmade knife flashing in her...
I remember the bowl—the thin porcelain that trembled in my hands. I remember the cold in the hall and the soldiers pushing people forward like they were sheep. I remember Azariah Gardner handing me the bowl and the number floating over his head: 80. "Pour it all down," he said, voice as flat as river ice. I looked at him. "You're sure?" I asked. He shrugged, unreadable. "The order came from the throne. Drink." I lifted the bowl to my lips. I could see numbers over everyone: some...
I woke to the sound of crying that had no business being mine to hear. "Why are you still crying?" someone wailed. "Who taught you to make such a noise?" "Quiet! Quiet!" an officious voice snapped, and the wailing turned into ritual laments — the practiced, mechanical grief that everybody in court had learned to show when the occasion demanded it. I opened my eyes and I was not in my bed. I was floating above my own life, or what remained of it. The room was a black-and-white hall of...
I wake to someone breathing against my neck. "Don't go," he mumbles. I stare at the ceiling, at the green canopy, and the breath on my skin turns my anger into a cold, humming panic. I roll, push, shout—"Let go!"—but the arms around me only press tighter. "Stop." My teeth find his forearm and I bite. He cries out, a small wounded sound that makes my whole body freeze. "Mother—" he breathes in my neck, and the single syllable collapses me from fury into a hollow I didn't know I...
I still remember the exact sound my phone made when it slid off the carpet and hit the floor. "Tap," it landed face down, screen black, like the moment someone closes a book on you. "You okay?" Jaxon asked from the doorway. "I'm fine," I said, but my voice was a thin thing. "I'm fine." "You don't look fine," he said, coming closer and squatting so his face was level with mine. "Tell me what happened." "I don't want—" I swallowed. "I can't say it out loud yet." "Say 'I can't...
I woke to a voice as sharp as broken glass. “You’re seven months pregnant and you don’t even know?” My brain felt like it had been struck by lightning. Pregnant? Me? With my body that doctors had told me was infertile? The odds had been a joke in my head until the paper on the desk told a different truth. The clinic door burst open. People flooded in. “My daughter is carrying someone else’s child? Get an abortion now!” my father barked, his palm slapping the table with the force of...
I woke up to a hand at my throat and a voice that sounded like winter iron. "Cry all you want," he said quietly. "It won't help." I gasped and closed my eyes. The hand was real. The fear was real. The memory that had stolen my last life slammed into me — the face of the man who betrayed me, the blood, the empty bed where my baby should have been. "Who—" I couldn't finish. He lifted me as if I weighed nothing and set me down on the bed. His face was close. His eyes were deep wells of...
I never thought the apocalypse would come like an argument I’d still be in the middle of. "It’s the third day," I told the bowl of noodles, and then I chewed and realized it tasted like the packing salt had been a little too generous. "You always do this," my mother said from her chair by the window. "You eat first and judge later." She stared at the street and did not blink. Her eyelids stayed heavy like they were keeping a secret in. I had thought about my father before the thought...
I remember the night like a bruise under my skin. "It was just fate," the note had said. "We are partners." "I can help your brother," the deal had promised. I stood under the streetlight while the rain tried to erase me. The city wind turned the trees into ragged soldiers. I hugged my thin coat and watched cars pass like indifferent whales. "You're soaked," a driver in a black suit said, but he drove on. "A real man helps," I muttered into my voice memo, and saved a line: Felix...
I woke up with the scene playing again, the same cruel replay that had ended my life last time. "Chana, even if you die, you still won't get Francisco," somebody's voice had hissed in that past life, warm and triumphant. "Ha. Francisco is my fiancé now. You should be happy for me, little sister." Kayleigh's laugh had swallowed the room like a greedy animal. "Don't be sad. There are more men in the world," Marjorie had cooed, all honeyed smiles and a knife in the palm. "Besides, your...
I woke with my throat dry and three small bodies warm against my ribs. "Mom!" Luca shouted, face pressed to my chest. "She woke!" Cason said, yawning like a small drum. Jessalyn blinked sleepy black eyes and reached for me with both fists. I rolled onto my back, hand under her head, and smelled the clean-iron air of the space. I counted my breathing, because counting kept me human. "You're late," Luca complained, rubbing his head where the buzz-cut left a tuft on top. "Late?" I...
"I opened the door and stepped into their storm." "I am Marina Cooley," I said, handing my old ID across the lacquered desk. "I came to be Everett's wife." Clark Corey sat behind the desk like a statue. "Marina," he said slowly, as if testing the name. "You are sure?" "I am twenty," I said. "This is my ID. My grandfather asked me to do this." He stared at the paper, then at me. "Why didn't your grandfather come?" "He's old," I told him. "He said he'd break things if he saw me do...
