Quick reads you can finish in 10-30 minutes
Found 1964 short novels
I always thought the worst thing that could happen would be losing someone. I never imagined losing someone and finding a copy in their place. "It’s ready," my mother said, carrying the tray into the kitchen. Her voice was the voice I knew better than any other. The clatter of bowls sounded normal. The light from the window painted the rice white. "You made liver?" I frowned and pushed my chair back. "You know I can't stand liver." She smiled and put a slice on my plate. "Eat. You’re...
"I said it once: we're breaking up." "I heard you," he sniffed, voice slick with practiced hurt, "Kiana, we've been together over a year. Don't you know how hard it is for me—being Liam Benjamin—trying to keep my image? Do you expect me to explain every rumor?" I watched him in the hospital room, the man who had once been my whole sky. Black suit, neat jawline, actor swagger like a brand. He tried to spin the world into his favor with a few smooth lines and the right tone. "I said it...
I learned one thing fast: if someone wants to bury you, give them the shovel and a good watch. "You ready?" Jessie asked, peering at me over her laptop like a nervous conspirator. "I'm always ready," I lied, because I wanted to sound steadier than I felt. My voice was small in the kitchen light. My palms were damp. "What if it backfires?" Josephine asked. She had that soft, scared way of speaking where every sentence begged forgiveness. "It won't," I told them. "Because the photos...
I held the thin diagnosis sheet at the hospital gate and watched the sunset bruise the sky. I wanted to call Lucas, but my thumb hovered and then withdrew. His name was the first on my phone. "Bea," his voice came, as always low and steady, kinder than usual. "I have something tonight. I might be late. Eat early, okay?" "Okay," I said. Short and as ordinary as the evening light. He clicked off. The line went dead. My throat closed around the small, heavy secret. I had loved him for...
I never panicked when the girl on the phone told me my husband was with her. I did not panic because I knew Arden Black would never really leave me. But she said, "He never planned to divorce you. He plans to kill you." 1 "You believe beauty can be heard in a voice?" she asked me on that first call, almost joking. I heard it then. I heard the softness, the calm, the thread of something young and untrained. I heard the wrong kind of sweetness. "Who is Liang—" she began, then...
"I keep seeing the girl's face," Karsyn said the first time she told me. "I can't un-see it," she added, and her voice was thin like paper. "Show me," I said. "Bring me the clip." "Cooper," she whispered, "I already looked dozens of times. You need to be sure." She sat across from me in the break room. The light over the table made a half-circle on her forehead. She had worked on those review stations for years; a thousand private scenes did not make her flinch. She had a steady,...
I found out my boyfriend had ghosted me on Valentine's Day because someone sent me a photo. "Look at this," my friend Jasmine Barrett texted, and I stared at the image until it blurred. In the photo, a woman in a pale yellow dress sat in a car with her back to the camera. My boyfriend—Kellan Zeng—had his face turned toward her, smiling like a lighthouse. Neon behind them flashed: "Valentine's Day—Second Drink Half Price." "This isn't me," I whispered to the room, touching the white...
"Open wide." I obeyed because it felt safer to obey. The white light above me made everything flat and simple, and the cool instrument in my mouth made my voice small. "Good," he said, and his voice was the exact voice I had memorized from another life. "Hold still." I kept still. "Nehemias," I said afterward, because the moment had to be named. My mouth tasted of metal and mint. "Emilia," he replied, almost a hush. "Three cavities." "Three?" I managed. "Is that bad?" "One...
I was thirteen the night my life was traded for fifty pieces of silver. "Juliet," my mother said as she shoved the coins into a ragged pouch and shoved me toward the open carriage, "count yourself lucky. You'll be kept warm. You'll eat. Don't make trouble." "Mother—" I reached, but her hand tightened like a clamp. "Don't call me that," she snapped. "You go be grateful to whoever buys you." I went because the world I knew had no other answer. The road smelled of moss and cold earth....
I noticed the little white dot on my thigh the way you notice a pebble in your shoe — absurd, nagging, impossible to ignore. "It looks like a birthmark," Daria said when she saw it first, leaning over my laundry basket in our cramped dorm. "That's not a birthmark," I told her. "I would have known." "It’s so small. Stop fussing," Olga said, tying her hair with one hand while scrolling with the other. "You worry about the strangest things, Ivy." "Fine," I said. "I’ll check it...
"I remember the village women always with swollen middles." "They looked like expectant mothers," I said, "but there were never babies." "They were all supposed to be pregnant," my grandmother said. "We called them 'the waiting women.'" "Why didn't I meet their children?" I asked. "Where did the babies go?" "You were too young to notice," Grandma Harriet Long said. "Or maybe some things are better not seen." "I grew up mostly with Grandma," I told people later. "My mother rarely...
I arrived in Huaihai under a sky the color of old metal. The airport lights smudged the horizon. The city breathed with the low hum of engines and factories, and the air tasted faintly of iron and distance. I pulled my too-large suitcase behind me and stared up, as if the stars might have remembered me. "You're Lydia Huang?" a man's voice asked behind a gate of hedges and fog. "Yes," I said. "Lydia." He nodded like someone who had been expecting a name he had only seen in a ledger....
Rain hits my umbrella. I step off the cracked stone and listen. "Do you hear that?" I ask, because the city always sounds different when it is dying a little. "Shut up, Elise. Keep moving," Gage snaps behind me, voice sharp as the wet air. I pull my silk coat tighter. The rain is thin, the kind that only makes the ground honest. Blood has already stained the stones here. I smell it before I see it. "That alley's trouble," Maxwell says. "Someone's been fighting." I stop anyway. I...
I remember the sound of a basketball against sun-warmed asphalt: the dull, impatient thud that announced his arrival before he did. He called my name for the third time before I bothered to lift my head. "Sullivan," I said, jogging the last few steps. I held a bottle of water like a talisman. He was standing in the middle of the court, the late sun cutting a hard line across his jaw. He frowned in that precise way that had once meant everything to me and now meant nothing. "What are...
I slept with a silver bracelet on my wrist because my mother said it would keep me safe. That bracelet, half of what happened in the hospital, and a willow head ring I wore like a child's promise — they kept my life in a little circle of proof, and later they marked the hour the world turned. "Where's your ID?" my mother asked as I sat on the hospital bed with my legs drawn up. "They'll need it to register anything." "She's not going to register anything," I said, and the sound of my own...
I opened my eyes to a ceiling too bright and a voice too gentle. "She's awake," the nurse said, and the sound of the words felt like a bubble I had to pop. "Franklin?" I tried to say my brother's name and it came out small. The nurse smiled down at me. "Kinsley, you fell down the stairs. You're going to be fine." "Fell down the stairs?" The words scrambled. My head felt like a library book dropped from a shelf. I remembered the book my roommate had shoved into my hands the night...
I never thought the word "mom" would be the hinge of everything. "Do you have to call me that?" I heard his voice over the clatter of glasses and the muffled laughter in the private room. He stood by the doorway like he owned the air, like he had learned to own rooms the way his father once did. "I said," I smoothed my skirt and smiled too politely, "call me what you feel comfortable with. I am not picky." He came forward, slow and deliberate. "You know my name, right?" "I—" My...
The slap landed like a blown window, and then I slid down the stairs. "I told you not to touch my things!" Ashton Bryant's voice thundered from above. I tasted copper and felt wood bite my palms. "Please," I managed, though the word came out small. "Ashton—" He stomped down, suit immaculate, jaw hard as if carved from marble. His face was breathtaking when it wasn't cruel, but his eyes wore a kind of hunger I had learned to fear. "You think this is a joke?" he said, and his hand...
"My sister is dead." "I know," I said. "I just... I just got a text from her phone." "Owen?" I heard a small voice from the hallway. "Are you sure?" "No, I mean—" My voice cracked. I pressed the phone screen until the dim light blurred. The message sat there in a plain bubble like a bone: three lines, nothing more. "Be careful of people in red clothes." "You can eat what Mom prepares, but if you find teeth, nails, hair or other human bits, don't tell Mom." "Be home before ten....
"One minute left," the invigilator said. "One minute!" someone behind me whispered. I bent over my answer sheet and tried to finish the last sentence. "Don't write that!" a voice snarled beside me. "Stop! Run!" A hand ripped my paper from under my pen. "Who—" I started. "Don't write!" the boy gasped. "Whoever finishes first dies!" The words were ludicrous until a wet, sudden sound filled the desk in front of me. "Boom," someone said, as if it were an ordinary...
