Quick reads you can finish in 10-30 minutes
Found 1964 short novels
"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...
I opened my eyes to the same thin light that had chased me awake for three days. "I need to find firewood before I die of hunger," I said to the empty temple and to myself. The temple smelled like stale incense and cold stone. My small body was tired, my palms had blisters, and my stomach made a sound like wind through a hollow reed. I am Kaliyah Daniel. I should have been three and helpless, but someone — some impossible luck — had handed me a chance inside this old child's body. I...
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 scored two hundred and ninety on my mock exam," I said to myself, lying flat on the cheap dorm bed as if facts could soothe me. "You flunked the real thing, Aliana," the streetlight outside my window hummed back, and the city smelled like gasoline and late-night instant noodles. I had let my college entrance exam slide — 290 — and my parents had packed their bags and left town in a fury straight to Hainan. The neighbor who rarely came by, a stooped woman who smelled of oil and boiled...
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 ran to the big red gate before anyone could tell me not to. "Stop," a voice shouted, but I kept running. I pushed the gate open and saw him first—my father, Gerald Barnes, older than the pictures, a little rough, an awkward man who smiled like a child when he was proud. "Father!" I called. He set down a woman I had never met. She carried a small boy and wore a thin orange robe trimmed with fur. Her hair was pulled up, and she moved like someone sure of herself. "Davina," my...
"Wake up, big sister! Don't die, please—" I open my eyes to a small, filthy boy clinging to my neck. My head hurts. Memory slams in: 1970. My father in uniform. My mother crying. An old woman scolding. I taste library dust. I was in a library! I was a grad student. Then—this. "Who are you?" I croak. The boy hiccups. "I'm Knox. You just... you just fell in the river. I pulled you out." I look down. My body is thin, small, clothes patched. I touch my hair. It feels like someone...
"I spat blood onto the floor." The taste of iron filled my mouth. I blinked and the room came back: the cold wood, the thin curtain, the dull light of morning. My body pulse-stepped, and a warm current ran through my veins like a small flood. A voice in my head said, "Countdown complete." "Who—" I tried to speak and coughed another thick mouthful of blood. I pressed my palm to my lips. The blood felt real. The pain in my head eased. The ache in my chest was gone. I laughed, a...
I have always been half a beat slow. "You're up late again," Coleman said without looking up from his papers. "I—" I stammered. "I was finishing a line." He still didn't look at me. He never looked at me like he used to. My name is Kamila Clement. I live in a house that holds too many memories and too much silence. When my mother and my stepfather had the accident, I didn't cry once in front of anyone. I saved my tears for the dark, for when the house was empty and the walls didn't...
I always liked quiet mornings—the kind that let me breathe without being judged. "I need a dress," I whispered to myself, flipping through a mountain of clothes on my bed. "They'll all laugh if I show up in the wrong one," I muttered. I am Casey Scott. I grew up in a house that used to be warm. The world decided to turn colder when I was four. My parents died in a crash and my grandfather raised me like a stray kitten he couldn't help loving. He called me his little joy. He said the...
I woke in the middle of the night with my head humming like a radio left on. The lamp light was a smear; my hands were small and hot as if I'd been holding a cup of boiling sugar. Augusto Cooper — my four-year-old, my clue to a life I couldn't quite stop loving — yanked my sleeve and said, "Mom, you need a hospital." "Go back to bed, sweetheart," I croaked, but he shook me like I was a puzzle stuck wrong. "Mom, you're burning." "Okay, okay," I said, surrendering to the steady truth. ...
I died with his knife in my ribcage and the taste of betrayal in my mouth. "Margot," he had whispered, "I've never loved you. Even your body disgusts me." "I will be grateful," I had said, staring at him with my last breath, "if you die with me and spare that bitch." He smiled like a gentleman as blood spattered his face. Brooks Lefevre, my husband of ten years, walked away from my body as if he had washed his hands. He left me for dead and used my family's ruin as his ladder into the...
I have waited for a man who rode away like a storm and left a promise behind. People said he died on the field. I would not hear it. I would not let my life be folded because someone else declared him gone. "It will be fine, Miss," Kiko said softly as she smoothed my sleeve. "Snow on this day means good years." "I know," I told her. "But I am waiting." The hall was full. My hair was pinned with jewels, my sleeves heavier than I had ever worn, and the world outside was a white that...
“Move!” I shouted, but the room still spun. The last thing I remember in the hospital was a patient biting a nurse's neck. Then teeth. Then cold blood on my hands. Then a robot voice counting down. “You are dead,” it said. “System link engaged.” Then I smelled dirt. “Where am I?” I whispered. “You're in 1973, Lena Feng,” the voice replied. “Binding complete. Countdown to global event: 24 hours.” I opened my eyes to two wild horses and a plank with teeth. “Jump!” someone...
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...
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 found out I was pregnant in the second year of my marriage. The two pink lines on the test were so impossible that my hands trembled when I filmed the moment I would tell him. I had spent years building a small corner of the internet around food—the little videos where I turned dinner into theater. So when I thought of telling Francisco, I staged it the only way I knew how: with food and a hidden camera. He opened the door with flowers in his hand like he always did. He still folded his...
I am Kaede Picard, and I woke up to Easton Ruiz’s voice sounding like an accusation in our living room. “You can leave. Go find someone better,” he said, like he had practiced the cruelty. I stood still. My eyes stung. “You can’t be serious,” I managed. “You heard me.” Easton’s face was flat. “If you don’t like it here, go.” I pressed my hand to my chest as if I could keep him from saying it again. “Did you mean that? You really mean it?” He put his cigarette down on the ashtray...
I never thought the word "brother" could taste like iron. "Brother," I whispered once when I was a child, and his face smiled like sunlight. "Josie," he said now, and it felt like the mouth of a cave. "Stop," I tried to say, but he already had his hands on my face. "Be quiet," Eldridge Picard murmured, very soft, and his thumb wiped the tear at my eye. "I've waited a long time," he said. "I—" I couldn't finish. "Relax," he said. "Relax and let it be easy." He had come...
