Quick reads you can finish in 10-30 minutes
Found 1964 short novels
I woke up on the kang, cold sweat soaking my hair, shouting a word that tasted like glass. “No!” I sat bolt upright. My chest heaved. My palm went to my face and came away wet. Tears. Real tears. “It was just a dream,” I told myself, but my voice sounded thin. The river had taken them in my dream—my parents swept away by a sudden rise of water. At the funeral the paper burned wrong and the whole house caught and my three brothers were inside. I had screamed; I had been dragged back. I...
I never thought a public bus would tell me who I was. I never thought a timetabled vehicle would be the last honest thing in a world of lies. "Seven twenty," I said the first time out loud, to the empty bench at the stop. "Always seven twenty." Someone behind me laughed, a small nervous sound. It was Maja. "You say that like it's a prophecy." "It's a schedule," I said. "Prophecies are supposed to be wrong." "You're the only one who notices," she said, and she did not sound pleased....
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 married him because my parents rushed me," I said once to myself when the ring was still new on my finger. "He was calm, polite, and precise. Gabriel Jensen said all the right things. We dated for less than three months. We signed. We promised." "He didn't seem like the sort who loved drama," I whispered, turning the thin band with my thumb. "He was wrong in ways I couldn't see at first." The first sign came the day after our wedding. "I tried for half an hour," I told him,...
I hate the new tutor because his skin feels cold and slick when he touches me. "I told you, Giana, stop being dramatic," Denver said, handing me a slice of pizza. "Not dramatic," I snapped. "He touched my hand and it was like ice." "Who touched your hand?" Denver asked, eyes bright. "Bowen Volkov." I pushed my hair behind my ear. Bowen had come to our house because my father wanted me to pass advanced math. Geoffrey McCormick thought a private tutor would save me from failing...
"I opened my eyes to a stranger's ceiling." I sat up so fast the room spun. Silk that smelled faintly of ink and early tea brushed my wrists. My name rushed at my lips—Ami Buckley—but the mouth that formed it tasted like someone else's name: Isabella Dyer. My chest tightened. Memory after memory hit me like winter. "I remember him," I said aloud. "Nehemias." A voice at the door—thin, practical—"Miss Isabella? You awake?" I swallowed. "Yes. Send my mother." Minutes later, the...
I woke to a broken sky and pain like iron stitching through my skull. "Is she breathing?" a coarse voice asked somewhere close. "Good riddance if she's dead," another voice said, mean and flat. "Don't say that. If the marquis asks, we'll say we went out and couldn't find her," the first voice muttered. I closed my fingers and felt my own blood. My head throbbed. Someone had said "marquis," and the name rolled like a stone inside me. I tried to remember the kitchen, the pressure...
I woke up to a ceiling I did not recognize and a headache like a bell tolling across a long life. "Where am I?" I muttered, and my voice sounded young, soft—too young for the bones I remembered. A man in a dark suit cleared his throat in the doorway. "Hazlee Pierce?" he said coolly. I blinked. The name in my head fit the face in the dressing mirror: a fresh, modern face with black hair and a mole just behind the ear. "Hazlee?" I echoed. The name landed like a new cloak on an old...
I never meant to see them that night. "I told you I'd be back," I murmured to myself as I pushed open the door to the KTV room, the music a thick wall I had to step through. The room smelled like cheap perfume and cola. My steps faltered when I saw Giovanni Baker pressed to Martina Christiansen in the corner, their faces close, the world around them blurred by music and light. Giovanni's hand cupped Martina's cheek. Martina's eyes were half-closed, cheeks warm with a color I hid for...
I remember thinking, at first, that the city smelled like rain and metal and a thousand strangers' lives. "I don't know this place," I whispered into the phone, hiding behind a potted plant at the airport. My voice shook so small only my friend could hear it. "Take a taxi to the address I sent," Xiaoxi's voice said. "Don't go to alleys. Don't trust people you don't know." "I—" I glanced back. Two suited men were following the line where I had been standing; their faces were unreadable....
"Move," I hissed. I was on the roof with a bow that trembled in my fingers and a plan that felt like a rope around my throat. Below, silk curtains billowed. Music leaked up like smoke. He was in the bath. "I told you to keep quiet," Callen whispered from the darkness at my shoulder. He smelled like cold iron and hot wind. "I can do this," I said. My voice was small. My heart was loud. The arrow left the string with a clean sound. Time went thin. "Shit!" Callen swore, the word...
"I told you not to brag in the dorm on day one," I said, sliding my battered woven bag onto the top bunk. "You wouldn't understand," Kendra sniffed, already in full performance mode. "Some people are just born famous." "Born famous or born loud?" I asked. "Which one is it, Kendra?" She smiled at the girls clustered by the door like a tiny court. "Valerie, why don't you tell them about your snake-skin sack? Where did you buy it, the farmer's market?" "You mean the bag my mother...
I teach high school literature. I always liked the quiet before the bell — the hush of early mornings when the school feels like a library, when the campus breathes slowly and the world seems manageable. I never thought I would be the center of a neighborhood war. I never thought a few slippers and a playlist could change so much. "It starts with slippers," I told someone later, because it did. Simple, quiet gestures can cause enormous ripples. One weekend, after three nights of sleep...
I remember the temple as a river of blood and wood smoke, candles guttering like dying stars. I remember skirts stuck to muddy legs, the smell of iron and wet earth. I remember looking up and finding a man among the dead who was not dead. He only said two words. "Save me," he croaked. I had once saved a starving pup and failed; I had cried for it for days. So when I hauled the man onto a stray pallet and carried him home to the little courtyard my mother left me, I told myself I would not...
"Move," I hissed, hauling him up by the collar. The stench of earth and old bone filled my nose. I had just woken on a hill of dead things and now a man's weight was on my shoulder. He moaned, a thin sound that might have been a name. "Don't talk," I warned. "Just breathe." He coughed. Blood stained his sleeve. I looked at his face in the moonlight. He was young. Too young to look like he had been beaten into a map of bruises. "Who are you?" I asked, sitting him against a...
“I remember my mother putting me down and walking out of the kitchen.” The house smelled like boiled rice and smoke. My aunt stood at the door with her hands full. My grandmother watched from the stove. No one made a sound. “She’ll be safer here for now,” my mother said without looking back. I was three days old when I first felt someone else’s hand hold me. I don’t remember the cold. I remember the voice that called me, clear as a bell. “Come to Dad.” The man who took me from my...
"I won't get up," I said, and pulled a pillow over my head. "Get up, Addison! You're going to be late!" Valentina grabbed the bedframe and yanked. Her twin buns bobbed. "Really, stop burying your face." I peeled the pillow back and squinted at ceiling rafters I did not own. Silk draped the window, not the cheap blinds from my last apartment on Earth. My hair—"my" hair—hung long and black across the edge of the bed like a comet tail. I wanted to be anywhere but here. "You'll be fine,"...
I woke up to a lighter than usual silence and the smell of cold air slipping under the bedroom door. I thought Greyson was asleep beside me, the small rhythm of his breathing steady and familiar. I planned to surprise him, to creep out and flick the light, to see him grumble and then smile. Instead I heard a lighter click, a low voice through the thin wood of the door, and a sentence that folded me in half. "I know Elena's coming back in March," he said into the phone. "She told me...
I woke up smelling old wallpaper and milk tea that was already cold. I blinked and the room around me was five years younger, smaller, less full of trophies and headlines. My hands were sixteen-year-old hands. My heart had the memory of falling. "You think I'm dead?" I whispered to the ceiling. "Why would I think that?" My own voice sounded thinner, younger. My throat closed on a laugh that tasted like iron. I remembered the high ledge, the scream, Qi Li's hand—Yulia's face—laughing at...
The red booklet fell out from between the old wardrobe doors like a confession I had been forgetting for three years. I picked it up and flipped the heavy cover with shaking fingers. It was a marriage certificate. For a moment the world narrowed to the rectangle of paper in my hands. I called the number on his card. "Hello?" a low, composed voice answered after a pause. "Are you free tomorrow to sign the divorce?" I asked. There was a breath. "Tomorrow?" "I found the...
