Quick reads you can finish in 10-30 minutes
Found 1964 short novels
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 won't let him touch her again," I said, and I meant the words like a child who has learned one very sharp tool. "Leah." My mother's voice was a thin thing when she said my name. "Do not make this worse." "He deserves worse." I flung the cup. "He deserves—" Marcus White laughed. The sound ate the air in the room like a cold wind. It made the palace girls jump and the eunuchs stiffen. The tea drenched his robe, slid from his shoulder in a dark, angry river. He straightened, droplets...
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 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 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...
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 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 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 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...
"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 to a pain that felt like being torn apart. "Don't—Leonardo—please—" I screamed. His face hovered over me. His handsome face, so cruel and cold last night, softened for a heartbeat when he recognized me. "Emilie," he said, and then the warning returned like winter wind. "Emilie Serra, you are my wife. You don't let anyone else touch you. If you see Hayes De Santis again, I'll ruin him." "Leonardo..." I wrapped my arms around his neck without thinking, crying. "I'm...
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 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 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 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'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 opened my eyes to someone bending over me. "Don't move," a voice said. I tried to sit up. My head felt like it had been split. The room wore half-dark like a lamp had been dropped. Silk lay in ruins around me. I smelled wine and smoke and something else — a metal, bitter smell that stuck at the back of my throat. "Where am I?" I croaked. A tall figure in a red coat stood near the screen. The coat had an embroidered qilin that made my chest go cold. "Who—" I began. Footsteps...
