Quick reads you can finish in 10-30 minutes
Found 1964 short novels
"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 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 remember the white wine glass turning in a slow circle, the liquid catching the light like a small moon. I breathed a little, then set the glass down without taking a sip. "Your family cooks Chinese food, right? You don't go to Western restaurants much?" he asked, unhurried, like he had all evening to fill the air with questions. "I—" I was splitting the hard shell of a lobster with my fork and table knife. My hand paused over a pink curve of meat. "I like both," I said. I tried to...
I remember drowning once, but it was cleaner in that memory than the first time I woke up on a dirt floor with my ribs aching and someone calling my name like it was a bell. "Are you awake?" a man's voice asked. It sounded like wind after thunder. I opened my eyes to bright, clear ones—eyes that belonged to a man who moved as if the world answered him. "I'm Lila," I said before thinking. My mouth tasted of river and iron. "Lila Marchetti." He smiled like he'd found a small treasure....
"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 woke up to light," I said, my voice like a rusty hinge. "Where am I?" "You in my bed," he said without turning, a low, smooth sound that set my head spinning in the gentlest way and the most dangerous way all at once. I blinked. The room smelled faintly of coffee and hotel soap. My hair spread like a dark fan over the pillow. My throat was dry. My body was ache-soft and oddly hollow inside. A napkin pressed to my nose tasted like metal. "Who are you?" I asked, thick and...
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...
“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 promised him I would say yes. Then, one night, the other man came for me. He crushed the cigarette under his shoe and pinned me to the wall. "One more chance," he said. "Who do you choose?" 1 I had walked into the red-lit alley because I was looking for my father. I didn't expect anyone I knew to be there. There was a little shop curtained with a lattice screen; beyond it, the light was a blurred, shameful red. A cluster of women in revealing clothes stood by the door,...
I was born with the wrong face. "Listen to me," Wilma Murray said the first time our eyes met. "You will wear her veils. You will never speak of your face. You will serve." I bowed until my head ached and answered, "Yes." I had asked for so little in life: a dry corner to sleep in, a bowl that did not rattle, a few hours without lashes. Instead I was lifted from the cold servants' room into silk and light, into the eyes of a family that kept me as a secret and a tool. Regina Malik...
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....
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...
I had no plan to meet Sullivan Arnold again that afternoon. "He's my cousin's dentist," Cash Bradley said as he bounced on his heels in the clinic waiting room. "You asked me to come," I told him, tugging on his sleeve. "You didn't have to make it dramatic." He grinned. "But you came. You're my hero." The reception clock clicked. The nurse called a name and the door opened. A man in a white coat stepped out. "Sullivan?" I heard his voice before I saw his face. My heart did a...
I woke up with someone else's face in my palms and a phone that buzzed like a trapped bee. "You're trending," the screen said. "Pregnant, father unknown," the headline glared at me. "Mom—" I tried, but the word was a cage. "Get out." Florence Hoffman said it like a verdict. "You should be ashamed," Ruben Collins said without looking at me. They both used my old name as if it were property. I held my bleeding forehead and let it settle: this body belonged to Imogen Clay, an...
I am a DNA analyst. My name is Journi Perrin, and I have hands that know how to read blood and bone like a map. "Journi," my cousin Claudia Moller said the first day she came to my little lab, "please, I'm begging you. Don't ruin my family." "Family?" I asked, sliding a sample tray across to an assistant. "You mean the one with the seventy‑two year old husband and the five‑year‑old boy?" Claudia put her face close to mine and smiled with practiced softness. "Yes. Karim is kind. He...
"I’m a flower," I told him. He looked at me as if I’d said something normal. He tilted his head, the brown coat at his shoulders rustled, and for a second his face was blank as a sky without clouds. "You're a what?" he asked, carefully. "I’m a flower that’s about to wither," I said. "Can I be planted in your pot?" He blinked. I blinked back. The elevator hummed; our skin smelled like elevator air and the faint soap of his coat. I sat down right on top of him with a rubbish flourish...
"I can't breathe," I whispered to the dark room that had been my hospital ward for days, but the words felt thin and useless. "You're awake," Zander Atkinson said from the doorway, his voice flat as if delivering profit figures instead of condolences. "That's good." "No," I said. "Not yet." He came closer in a way that used to make my chest warm. "Aoi, we've all suffered—your aunt's death is a tragedy." "My aunt is dead because of Gemma," I said. Zander smiled like a tired man...
I was tying a tiny bow on a white shirt when Matteo kissed me in the hall and told me he had to go to Shanghai for three months. "Take this," I said, handing him the suitcase I had bought for him a fortnight earlier. "Don't throw it around." He hugged our daughter, Elsie Robertson, who had wrapped her arms around his leg and said, "Daddy, don't go long." "Just three months," Matteo Chavez said. "I'll phone every night." "Send me a photo from the airport," I told him. "I like to see...
