Quick reads you can finish in 10-30 minutes
Found 1964 short novels
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 first time people started pointing at our door like it hung some story between its hinges. "Look—it's them," someone nudged. "The monk who gave it all up and the witch he took." "They say she left the mountain for him," another voice whispered, loud enough for the whole room to hear. I laughed and leaned against Laurent. He smelled like was always the same: wood smoke and a faint clean salt from the river where he still liked to wash his hands. Guests at the inn gathered...
I woke to the smell of porridge and the world split back into halves: a half that had fought beside me for a hundred light-years, and a half that smelled of wood smoke and old cloth. "My child, you nearly scared me to death!" Aunt Haisley cried, her voice folding over me like a blanket. "She's breathing," Uncle Julian said, sitting down hard. "Thank the heavens, she's alive." I tasted rice before I could form a thought—the warm, milky porridge sliding down my throat like a small mercy....
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...
Sometimes it takes a tiny act of courage to pull something out of your chest. Sometimes it's the courage to hand over a hidden bouquet, or to speak a shy sentence that bowls the whole room over. I had courage enough that night, and I did something worse: I gave away a secret. "Happy eighteenth," Gabriella said, holding out a glass box. "I thought you might like this." Her fingers were cool. Her smile was small and full of careful light, like a lamp kept on low in the corner of a...
"I can't do this any longer," I said, my voice breaking like a small shell under a boot. "Just a little longer," Julio said from above. His breath hit my face like cool marble air. "Oh." I focused on the wind that bit me, and I whispered, "Hurry." There was no pity in his voice. "Sorry, slipped." "My fault." I tried to laugh but it came out as a sob. I dangled beneath the old execution platform they called the Azure Judging Stand. The ropes bit into the skin at my shoulders. The...
"I brought something for your mother," I said, lifting the cardboard box so the logo showed. She glanced down and her face changed like someone flipped a switch. "What is that? Grapes?" "Yes," I said. "They're called Romantic Ruby." "Romantic Ruby?" Her eyebrows rose. "You expect me to believe your family can even buy Sunlight Rose? Farmers are poor, you know." "I'll put them on the table," I said. "They're for you." "What's your parents' job?" she asked while fingering the...
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...
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...
I was twelve the first spring I learned how to steal fish from a river and make the world listen. "Look," I told the sun on my face and the buzzing flies, "we're making dinner." "I am recording," a small mechanical voice answered from nowhere and everywhere at once. It sounded like a tin ladle clinking, and I pretended to be very surprised even though I'd been pretending all morning. "What did you find?" I asked the tin-ladle voice, which for reasons I could not explain I had named in...
I opened the blue door. "You're late," the man said. He was half in shadow, lean and tall, the light behind him making his shoulders a soft dark line. I could only see his voice fold into the room like a soft cloth. "I'm—" I started, then stopped. My hair prickled as if someone had touched a static wire on my head. "You're not the hypnotist?" he asked. "No." I blurted it. "I teach kindergarten. I tell kids stories until they sleep." He smiled. "So you tell stories." "Yes."...
I live on the twelfth floor. I never thought a pet snake would decide my apartment is a better place to nap. "It hissed at me," I told the 119 dispatcher, voice shaking. "A small white snake, like a finger. Please come." "Stay calm, ma'am," said the voice on the line. "We'll send someone." I didn't stay calm. I bolted to the living room and kept glancing under the couch. Someone knocked, then the door opened, and men in helmets filled my doorway like a practiced scene. They moved...
"I wake choking on cold air." I open my eyes to stone and iron, to a torch guttering in a dark cell. Pain lives under my skin like a second person. My hands are raw. My legs are empty at the knees. I can taste metal and old blood. A boot scuffs the hall. A cloaked man stops at the bars. He breathes like someone carrying a secret. "Do you remember me?" he asks. I pull myself up on cracked palms. "You should not have come." He crouches. "Jonas Brown sends his greetings." My...
1 I eased myself into the inner chamber of the Hall of Clear Rule under the thin moonlight and the roof's shadow. The guard by the door saw me and stepped back without a sound. "I brought a light," I whispered as I struck the tinder. "Keep watch." "Yes, Your Majesty." Zeke Benton bowed and left me standing on the threshold. I lit the foreign incense I'd smuggled from the western traders, the kind that smelled like sun-warmed wood and sea salt. The smoke rose slow and blue in the thin...
I watched the lightning fall and thought I would never stop feeling the cold. "Stop," I ordered, but the word came out hollow. The storm paid me no heed. "You killed her entire clan," someone whispered at my shoulder. "You gave her the thunder sentence?" "Relax," I replied. "She is a nine-tailed fox. She can't die." "But—" the voice stuttered. "She already cut eight of her tails to save you. She bled her heart's blood for you. She's been living on a heart-essence. And you—today you...
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 am Guadalupe Chen. I told myself once, many years ago, that I would never be the one to sit quietly while someone else took what should have been mine. I remember the exact taste of the crab puffs my father bought for my elder sister, Marine Bowers, and the hollow of envy that opened in my chest the day she smiled and ate while I watched. I remember the way my mother, Evelyn Everett, flinched at every request from my sister as if treading on glass. I learned then to make mischief and hide the...
"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 almost laughed when my mother called me "old maid" at my birthday dinner. "You're thirty soon, Kinley," Maureen said, waving a napkin like a wand. "You should be thinking about settling down." "I know, Mom," I said, and smiled the way you smile when you're defusing a harmless mine. "I'll let you pick someone suitable if you like." Maureen huffed theatrically and went back to fussing with the candles. Grant, my father, pretended not to notice, reading his paper, but his eyes flicked...
"I woke up with the taste of dirt and the world like a bell banging in my skull." "I woke up?" I whispered. My voice was mine, bright and sharp, and for a dizzy second the sound scared me more than my headache. A sliver of sky cut through the cave mouth. I crawled toward it and found my body dirty, bruised, my hair in a tangle. A man's coat lay across my chest. Jewelry was still on my fingers. My head ached like someone had hammered it. "This isn't my kitchen," I said. I was an...
