Quick reads you can finish in 10-30 minutes
Found 1964 short novels
I got drunk on my birthday. "I'll be fine," I told Lorenzo when he raised an eyebrow. "It's just one night." "You said that last time," Lorenzo said, hands already cupping a beer bottle. "And the time before that." "I'll be different tonight," I lied and smiled anyway. At midnight I waited, like I had every year, for that one private message. Years of habit make men ridiculous. When I was younger I thought my mother would show up somehow—call, text, something. She had been gone for...
I remember the press room lights like a white glare that never cooled. I remember the host's grin, the camera lenses, the pressure. I remember my hand—wrapped in bandage—on my phone, and the game we had just lost. I remember a taped-on task: call the first contact in my phone and say "I miss you." "Elise, are you ready?" the host whispered into my ear. I swallowed. "Ready." The phone rang. It walked through the long hollow seconds like an echo. When a man answered, his voice was colder...
I woke up with the same cold in my chest as always and a different kind of memory lining the edges of my mind. "I can't—" I heard a voice in the dark of my old dream, the voice that had haunted me. "Half an hour, I can't make it—" "Shh. Stay still. I—" Another voice, close, tender, but wrong. The scene broke like thin glass. I sat up, heart hammering, and for a second I tasted iron and felt a shame that wasn't mine anymore. Then the truth hit me: that wasn't a dream. That was last life,...
I never imagined the worst, boldest thing I would ever do at twenty-seven was to use a lie to take what I wanted for one night. "You said we'd pretend nothing happened after that door," I told him across the table at Peninsula Coffee. "And yet you're here," he said. "I said what I meant." "You meant to pry," he answered, calm as a cold lake. "I meant to get back at a coward," I said. I was Isabella Diaz. I was a urology doctor assigned to the VIP clinic at Kyoto General, the...
"I can't feel my own name." Rain hit the tile like a hand, hard and steady. I opened my eyes and tasted iron. My throat burned as if someone had scrubbed it raw with lemon. The room smelled of wet cloth and cold skin. Lightning made the world flicker into white, then back into shadow. A woman lay beside me on the straw pallet. Her face was pale as moonstone. Her belly was gone flat, a crude patch of stitches and blood-dark fabric. "Is she breathing?" someone whispered. I sat up....
I woke up and the world had rearranged itself around a stranger’s chest. "Who are you?" a low, controlled voice asked from beside the couch. "I'm... Alexandra," I answered, voice foreign and steady in a way mine rarely is in the morning. I blinked at my hands—broad, veined, callused in a way I’d never seen on myself. "And you are?" "Cairo Ford," he said. "Cairo..." I tried the name on my tongue. "Sounds familiar." "You don't remember me?" His brow creased. "I—" I laughed,...
I lit a cigarette in the dark and watched the smoke curl toward the moon. I did not turn the light on. The room felt huge and empty even with two beds in it. He left the bed, walked to the bathroom, and did not come back the way he had left. I peeled my face from the pillow and watched the doorway until he was gone. I only knew his shape by the thin strip of moon on his shoulders and the dull glow coming from the courtyard lights. I am Juniper Morin. For two years I wore my sister’s name...
"I hit him full on." I say it out loud because my head is spinning and saying it makes it real. "Did you mean to?" a low voice asks. I lift my face and see him. Cyrus Mori is taller than every picture, darker-eyed than every ad, and he smells like soap and cold air. He lets me fall into the wall and doesn't move to help. He only watches, like I am a small quake. "Watch where you're going," Katelyn Perry, his agent, snaps from behind him. "This is not a place for drama,...
“Carry him inside!” I shouted before I even knew who I was anymore. Snow hit my face and tasted like metal. I followed Finch Deleon and two burly guards through the courtyard toward a boy kneeling in the white. He was thin under a too-large robe, one hand buried in snow, the other wrapped in filthy bandages. Blood bled through the wrap and freckled the drifts. “He’s losing feeling,” Finch said, breath steaming. “Miss, should we—?” I straightened. My whole chest felt like it had been...
I still remember the exact sound my pulse made the first time I saw her again. "Do you know her?" Sebastien asked as she came down the staircase. "Who?" I said, but I knew. She wore white like a princess: a filmy dress, designer shoes, a smile that shone because it had never needed to carry shame. "Brooke," Sebastien said, and his voice had that warmth I had loved for years. Angelina Archer laughed as she reached the bottom step and swung an arm around his elbow. "This is my...
“Get your hands off him!” I heard myself yell as I lunged forward. “Imogen, wait—” Graydon Sherman’s voice cut in, steady and low. He moved faster than I expected and wrenched the man away from Jayden. The stranger staggered and hit the table. People in the hotel lobby stopped and stared. I held Jayden to me. His little face was flushed, forehead damp with sweat. He blinked up at me, enormous dark eyes full of trust. I breathed as if I could breathe for both of us. “Is he hurt?”...
"Wake up, Marianne. The baby is coming." I felt Yale’s hands on my shoulders and my whole body went sharp with pain and with hope. "Hold my hand," I said. "Hold it tight." "Of course," Yale said, breath rough. "This is our girl. I can feel it." The yard was full of men and women, my brothers-in-law, old neighbors, people who came because this kind of birth is news in a small place. They sat on stools like judges. They looked at me like my breath was a promise to them. "I can't do...
"I need to see you in ten minutes." Marshall's voice was flat through the line. "I'll be there," I said, and I was already packing the folder. I had been Marshall Yamashita's chief secretary for seven years; I knew the sound of his impatience like the pattern on my palm. "I only have twenty minutes," he added. "Then you'll get twenty minutes," I answered. I worked like that for years—fast, accurate, invisible until needed. I also loved him in a way that had nothing to do with...
"I don't want you to leave me," he mouthed against my hair. I opened my eyes to the dark, to Greyson Fisher's face close enough to see his breath fog the space between us. His hands were hard as stone, his chest rising, falling. For a second my mind blanked, then memory exploded—ten years, a party, a drugged cup, a bed that wasn't mine. "Greyson?" I whispered. My voice felt small. He nodded slowly. He read lips. He had always read mine. The room smelled like stale perfume and...
I knew I was different the moment my ears woke me. "Name?" the man across the desk asked, tapping his pen like it was a gavel. I flopped my ears and tried to sound normal. "I don't have one. They call me... Rabbit." He blinked once, and I felt the way his gaze studied me, hungry for details like a cataloger. When he frowned, my ears drooped. When he relaxed, they lifted again on their own. I had woken up human. I had no memory of a childhood outside the forest. One night I slept in...
"I can hear the clapping," I said, awake to the noise of my own birthday—my birthday—fading in through the bathroom door. "Sing louder," someone teased outside. "This one's for Genevieve." "Shh," came a soft voice I thought was kind. "Let her enjoy." "I am," I told the empty room. "I am." I had not planned to cry that night. I had not planned anything. The last year had been a study in small defeats: the hospital's whisper, the rehab's routines, the halting, polite pity of...
I never thought a little rhyme could smell like rot. I never thought a line sung by children would point to corpses. "Listen," I said, keeping my voice low. "Do you hear them? The children on the lane—singing that song again." Mark Solovyov folded his arms and looked at the lane as if he could stop the world by frowning. He always looked at things like they were problems he could lift. "Can't you see," Mark said, "they're only kids." "They call the dead by name," I answered. "That...
I woke with the taste of hot spring steam in my mouth and a stranger's voice like a cello lowing right against my ear. "What's your name?" I opened my eyes to water rippling and a pair of hands—belonging to someone who smelled of steam and stone—locked around my waist. The rest of his body was sculpted in bronze and shadow; I could not see his face through the fog in my dream, but I could feel the weight of him. For half a year, that same man visited my sleep, the exact body I had written...
I still remember the exact moment the rumor started, how it spread from mouth to mouth like a spilled jar of ink, staining everything it touched. "You see her? That's Stella Gallo. Caught cheating on the last math exam," someone whispered the first day I returned to the new classroom after the transfer. "Wait—Stella? But she entered City One as the top scorer in the whole district," another voice replied, incredulous. "Her dad is the education bureau director. Heard they arranged seats...
The first time Avianna died in my arms, Grant was at a rooftop party celebrating some girl's birthday. "You promised you'd come," I said once, through tears, when his voice finally reached me like a distant echo. "It was just—" he began, and then the line went dead. I held Avianna's small, warm body, the bell on her wrist chiming once, and the world narrowed to that one ringing sound and the coldness of a hospital roof. Then I jumped. I woke up to my twenty-third birthday. The cake...
