Quick reads you can finish in 10-30 minutes
Found 1964 short novels
"I found her through a picture," he wrote, as if the words were dull facts, like the weather. "You only need one photo," the rest of the file read, and then the voice in the recording—small, flat, almost bored—began to tell a story that sounded like a list of chores. "Her profile showed she was single, lived alone, and went running every Friday night. That made things easy." I listened to the recording in the interrogation room speakers and let the sound fill the space until it felt like...
I never thought being forgotten could feel like a second life. "You said the warlord is back?" Katelynn burst into the courtyard, her cheeks pink and her eyes wide. "Again?" Finley yawned, ruffling the tiles with her fan. "Does it matter?" "Yes! It matters a lot," Katelynn said. "He didn't come alone." "He didn't?" Heather's chopsticks froze mid-air. "No way," Cecilia whispered, as if the very word might summon him. I put down my cup, looked at the three of them, and let the...
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...
I said the words as if I could sign away my life like a ledger. "Fine. I'll marry him." Silence fell so clean it cut. Men who had been shouting a half-hour ago froze. The old white-bearded minister closest to the dais turned his face away as if my sentence stained him. "Princess," my father said at last, eyes like tired glass, "don't be foolish." "I am not being foolish," I answered, stepping forward, bowing low because the theater demanded it. "My sister is missing. My little ones...
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 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...
“Mom, don’t die, Mom…” I open my eyes to a small face streaked with dirt and dried tears looking down at me like I am a miracle. “Mom, are you awake?” I try to speak. My throat is cotton. My body is like a sack of stones. The roof is black, the walls a hard brown clay. The air smells like old bread. A child’s hand curls into my shirt and I feel a tiny heartbeat against my ribs. “I’m here,” I whisper. “I’m here.” Her name is Ivory. She’s three. She wants to give me a sugar cube as...
I saw the message on his phone the way you see a red warning light on a car dashboard—small, sudden, impossible to ignore. "Are you free tonight?" the contact asked. I froze with a fork halfway to my mouth. The contact name was saved as "V-wei," the kind of silly nickname I'd used for the girl from my hometown when I taught her the etiquette routines. Veronique Marques had called me "Caz" and "big sister" since orientation week. She'd been the kid I carried into the team, the one I...
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 never thought my first day as a graduate student would end with a courtroom-like scene in the chemistry building, with half the department staring and my adviser, Canon Yoshida, shrinking under questions like a caught rat. I walked to orientation because my building was close and because I still used my old flip phone. My grandfather, Professor Elijah Zaytsev, always taught me to be careful with new tech. He said, "Some things are meant to be measured, not shown." I took coins to pay the...
I woke up after five years. The room smelled like hospital disinfectant and cheap tea; my head felt split open. My mother's face hovered near mine—Monica—alive and soft, and my mouth filled with a sound that was part laugh and part sob. "Are you awake, Emerson?" she whispered, fingertips worried at my forehead. "I—" I tried to focus. "Mom?" She smiled like sunlight. "You scared us. You were... fainting again. Rest, okay?" I hugged the illness, and the memory came back like a...
I blinked and the world flipped from my cramped, familiar bed to a floor so cold it stole the heat from my calves. One second I was cursing at a teammate on voice chat; the next second I was on marble tiles with chandeliers glaring down like stars. "Who are you?" a voice said. I looked up. He sat like a statue on a velvet sofa, the kind of man in movie posters that made my brain short-circuit. His jaw was sharp. His suit was a different art form. His eyes were winter water. "I—" I...
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 am allergic to men." "I am allergic to women." "I am allergic to fame," I joked once, and life decided to test me. "I thought you were asleep," Haley said when she opened the car door and saw me rubbing my left eye. "I am awake," I said. "Just tired." "Jude texted again." "He always texts," I said. "Ignore him." "He says it's promotion. He says it's fake. He says he's sorry." "Tell him I'm allergic to apologies," I muttered. Haley Alvarez shot me a look like she...
I woke up to bright white lights and a voice that said, "Sofia, you can breathe now." "Where am I?" I croaked, my throat raw. "You're safe," Drake said, hands steady on my shoulders. "You're home." "You—" I tried to hold the name, but the room blurred. "Drake?" He didn't answer like I expected. He only held me like a man afraid the world would blow me away if he let go. "You're tired," Jaelynn whispered somewhere behind him while someone lifted a towel for me. "You get cleaned....
I woke in a dark room with half-burned red candles guttering on the wooden sill. The light was thin and trembled. I lay curled on a straw-filled kang, my face like a white cloth. My name felt wrong on my tongue; everything felt wrong. "Where am I?" I whispered. A shadow moved beyond the oiled paper window. Men laughed, voices thick with rice wine and the kind of rough jokes that spill out at other people's doors. "This is my bed?" I said again, to myself. Someone pushed open the...
I was twenty the summer I chose to spend my days with a rusty cart and a long wooden pole. "I want to try living like people who don't have everything," I told my father when he handed me a bright credit card and plane brochures. "You sure, Lila?" he asked, surprised. "You could fly to islands or see palaces." "I want to pick bottles for a while," I said. He laughed the way he always laughed, a booming, honest sound. "You always surprise me, kid." So I surprised myself by leaning...
I died and the last call I made went straight to his voicemail. I hovered above the snow and watched my body curl into a small, defeated shape in the yard where we had grown up. My phone kept flashing beside me, "Drake Contreras" lighting the screen like an accusation. "He's calling back," I told myself, though there was no breath to make the words mean anything. "It's too late." I didn't want to die that day. The snow had been too soft, the swing's squeak too much like our childhood,...
I woke on a couch I had sat on dozens of times in another life and felt like I had been squeezed through a white light, pressed flat and stitched back into myself. "I... where am I?" I whispered, because the old habit of talking soothed me. "You're at Global Entertainment," someone said behind a desk. "Do you remember your schedule?" I blinked. The name did not belong to the day I had died. It belonged to a different timeline I had woken into: a world six months earlier than the one...
