Quick reads you can finish in 10-30 minutes
Found 1964 short novels
I never planned to be rescued. I planned to survive. "When you're eighteen," Foster told me once, "you have to learn how to stand." "I already know how to stand," I said, clutching a worn notebook to my chest. He looked at me the way he always looked at me then — as if I were an interesting detail he hadn't decided what to do with. He was taller than anyone I had met, broader, quiet. Foster Herrera lived like a winter: spare, strict, impossible to warm. He had the kind of hands that...
I kicked the little bundle of fur off the edge of the bed and glared at the man grinning at me. "Why foxes?" I asked, pointing at the wriggling litter. "Because you're a little fox," he said, still smiling, like the joke landed perfectly. I grabbed a paper talisman from his desk and slapped it at his face. "I know you're a daoist. But why did we have—why did we give birth to—pure-blood fox kits?" He tightened his hold on my hand and pulled me close. He breathed in my ear and said...
I opened my eyes to dust and a dry, cracked smell like old bones and summer gone wrong. "She's awake!" a rough voice called. "Give her water, some food, then leave," another voice answered. For a second I thought I was back in the van with the team. Then my stomach knotted, memory like a broken dam poured in, and I realized I was not in any van. "Where am I? Did my dog open a door again?" I muttered, more to myself than anyone else. "Woof!" A familiar bark answered—not outside,...
1 “My name is Kiley Riley,” I said to the empty room, because that felt like the honest thing to do. “You really should stop talking to yourself,” Maria Berg said from the doorway, rubbing at her apron like she was dusting off a memory. “Or at least don’t do it in the living room.” “Maria, I already told you I’ll move if you must,” I answered. “But not today. I have exams next week.” “You have more important things to do than complain about exams,” she said, the way small-town...
I never planned to be the headline of my own little disaster on 520. I thought I'd be at home, scrolling through the same half-broken dating apps and entering the fifty-second lucky-draw with the same unlucky fingers. Instead, I stood in a crowded Western restaurant, wearing shoes that pinched, holding a crying-brand bag, and asked the wrong question to the wrong person. "It's odd," I blurted before I could stop myself, "Carter, you haven't been married yet?" Silence chilled the...
I woke to summer light pooling on my face and a ridiculous, embarrassed smile I couldn't explain. "Ugh," I muttered, pulling the blanket over my nose. "Of all mornings." I stayed absolutely still for a full minute, not wanting to disturb the tiny dream that had left me with a flush. In the dream a man stepped from a shower wrapped in a towel—only muscle and mystery, no face—and my stupid heart had done that catch-it-doesn't-have-a-rhyme thing. "Alaina, are you awake?" my mother shouted...
I was sixty and I had learned to like the quiet. "Mom," my daughter Christina called, "we're here. Happy birthday." "I know," I said, and I meant it. I knew everything worth knowing about small kindnesses. I knew how a cup of tea could be a whole afternoon. I knew how a child’s warm head on my knee could make the world make sense again. "Tell me a story, Grandma," Chie begged, climbing into my lap and looking up with the kind of bright, unguarded face children get before the world...
I woke up gasping, the river cold in my lungs, the taste of mud and iron still clinging to my teeth. I sat bolt upright in a bed I did not recognize, my body light as if the bruises and broken bones had never happened. "Child—my child?" I called out without thinking. A pale canopy, sunlight through gauze, a stranger's back framed in the doorway. He turned, and something in me leapt—familiar as a scar. "You are awake." His voice was low, edged with an easy calm that made my chest both...
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 was told I would not live past eighteen. I was told I carried a curse that would drag everyone close to me into ruin. I am Gillian Robinson, and I lived to learn the meaning of that last sentence. My childhood is a line of missing faces. "My wife won't wake up," my father said once, in a way that meant the rest of the house had already died. Then my mother was gone. Then my older brother drowned. Then my father's business collapsed and the debts came like claws. Then...
I opened my eyes to pain and a cheap spring mattress and a ceiling fan that smelled like a summer afternoon from ten years ago. I blinked and the world slid into place: the sticky heat, the smell of instant coffee from the kitchen, the faded poster of a biology olympiad pinned crooked on the wall. I touched my temples. The scars weren't there. The memory of metal bent around metal, glass blooming red—gone. "Patricia? You okay?" My father sounded younger. His voice carried the soft, tired...
I bought the parking spot to stop my nightly hunt for a place to leave my car. "Private spot," the metal plate said, the letters bold and blunt. "I paid for it," I told no one, because parking takes no witnesses. That first evening I returned to find a black Audi sitting right in front of the elevator, like it owned the whole garage. "You're in my space," I said to the empty car, because anger needed a name. "Maybe the owner doesn't read signs," I muttered as I wrapped an A4 note...
"I need him to answer the phone." I grab the phone with one hand and the world tilts. "My water broke," I whisper, and the pain roars louder than my voice. "Are you sure?" Everest Freeman's voice is flat on the other end. I hear nothing but a breath and then a stranger woman's laugh. "Everest, I'm back." That laugh kills me slower than the knife I will almost feel in the hospital later. "I thought you promised me." The woman, Mercedes Alvarado, sounds calm. "One week after the...
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....
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...
I never thought a plate of extra-spicy chicken would change anything — until it landed on Kenneth Avila's head. "I can't believe you came up here," Kenneth breathes, trying to wipe the red oil from his hair. "Brielle, what are you doing?" "I'm making you eat the chicken you told me to bring you," I say. "And I'm feeding you the truth." I set the plastic lid down as if it's a verdict. "You can't—" he stammers, rubbing his face. The sauce drips off his jaw and splashes on the dorm floor....
I remember the hallway sound first—the low, rolling groan that made every hair on my arms stand up. It pressed at the door like a storm. The room smelled of stale coffee and fear. People sat on the floor in a ring, faces hollowed by five days of trapped hunger and the same repeating nightmare: if the door opened, they would die. I pushed my hood further down over my forehead and said, "Maybe we should go out." A man nearest me barked a laugh that had nothing funny in it. "Go out? To...
"I remember the number of our dorm: 2406," I said softly. "Why that number?" Clementine asked, stirring her tea. "It stuck," I answered. "It stuck like a bruise." "I still can't believe you invited us here," Carly said, looking at me the way she used to look at strangers on a livestream. "What is this, a reunion?" "It is," I said. "And an ending." "An ending?" Victoria's laugh was quick and cold. "Laurel, you always liked dramatic words." "Then listen," I said. "Listen and...
I was born again into the Calhoun courtyard with an old man's memory in a baby's body. "I can't see," I said, though my voice was a newborn's little cry. I sounded like any infant. Inside, I was thirty and stubborn and oddly amused. "Where am I?" I tried to think. I remembered a car, a bright pain, and then darkness. Then a woman's voice cut through the dark like a bell. "Push! Keep pushing!" someone cried. I felt a tug and a breath of cool air. A woman's voice laughed with...
