Quick reads you can finish in 10-30 minutes
Found 1964 short novels
I kicked the rusted door open and the house answered with a long, tired groan. "I have to go," I told the dark hallway, breathing loud in my own ears. The floorboards under my sneakers creaked like old bones. I shoved my shoulder into a closet door and dug through the jackets. "I need a bigger bag," I said, hoarding scarves and a broken raincoat into a worn backpack. A window glass broke three rooms away. Something heavy hit the kitchen glass. "Stay calm," I said, and the voice...
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...
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 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...
"Get up." I dropped the script and the room went quiet. "Are you okay?" Monica asked. Her voice shook more than mine did. "No," I said. "I'm not okay." I still remember the smell of the studio that night—cold air, dust, cheap coffee. I remember Chandler's laugh, the way his eyes had sharpened when they landed on me. I remember the kiss that wasn't a kiss and the price he put on my silence. "You shouldn't have worn that dress," he had told me once, as if he owned the meaning of my...
I woke up to the smell of disinfectant and the dull ache beneath my ribs. Someone was breathing close—steady, careful. "Minerva," a voice said, soft and reined in. "Don't move." "I can't see," I answered. My voice scraped like old paper. "That's okay," the voice whispered. "I'm here." "I thought he would come," I said, because I had thought it for four years and for the months before that. "I thought Raymond would come." "He did come," the voice said. "He came and he—" "I...
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 woke up tasting river mud and other people's memories. I should have been drowning, but someone or something had dragged me out like a fish. I lay on the cold sand and kept my eyes shut, pretending to be dead. Pretending would buy time. A middle-aged man in a coat of small men and a voice like a bell leaned over me. He called me “miss” and told the bearers to carry me. They lifted me like I was light as a shawl and dumped me into a sedan. I smelled lacquer and tea, and I realized I was...
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 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...
They called him a savior the day he bent over my broken body and dragged me out of a field of dying men. "Cruz Omar," they whispered, and when he looked at me with those cold, precise eyes, something in the camp seemed to straighten. I should have known then that the favor was a ledge, not a gift. "I am Elora," I told him the first clear night I could speak. "You saved me." "You owe me nothing," he said, but his hand did not leave my shoulder. "Stay where I can find you." I...
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...
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 wake up to the sound of a baby’s crying and a damp, earthy smell. My throat is raw, my body thin and hollow like a dried gourd. I try to speak and only a cracked breath comes out. “Harriet, you’re awake?” a soft voice says. It’s a voice that tugs at something deep and stubborn inside me. “Who—” I start and stop, then the memory hits me like cold water. The hospital office, the mid-level doctor’s face, the broken things I left behind. The coughing fit. The man who came in late and said,...
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 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 nurse’s voice like a radio backscatter: soft, worried, rehearsed. “Miss Mikhaylov, are you sure you want to leave? You’re only in the middle stage. There’s still a chance—” “Thanks. It’s my choice.” I slid the discharge papers across the counter with hands that didn’t tremble as much as I thought they would. The room smelled like antiseptic and old magazines. The word cancer had space-rented room in my chest, but I’d made room for other things too: a small, stubborn plan, and...
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 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 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...
