Quick reads you can finish in 10-30 minutes
Found 1964 short novels
"I need two people," I said to myself the night I realized my assistant had quit again. "Why two?" a voice in the room asked. "It wasn't talking to me," I answered my empty office. "It was just the spreadsheet." The startup life had taught me how to argue with silence. "Five applicants," I told my phone the next morning, checking the list. "Pick two." Then I met them. Four of them walked right back out when they saw the place. "You're not paying real salaries," one man said and...
"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 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...
"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...
They had been waiting for the thunder like it was a blessing. "She’ll ascend today," someone whispered near the gate. "Three months and she’s already at Perfect Divine. How could any of us compare?" "Three hundred years of us, and she did it in sixty days," another voice said. "If she makes it, Longqing Sect becomes the first to hold a High Deity disciple." I smoked a yawn into the wind. "Save your prayers," I said aloud, waving a lazy hand down at them. "If I die, the sect can try...
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....
My father died with a secret inside his breath and a folded paper in his hand. "I want you to find your mother," he whispered. "She didn't die. She remarried. Go—find her." I pressed my face into the pillow and kept the paper. It smelled faintly of smoke and tea. I was twelve, and I had a village in my bones and a train ticket in my pocket. At the station, Mrs. Wang pressed steamed buns into my hands. "Don't go hungry, little one," she said, and her eyes shined. Old Mr. Li set a water...
They made me kneel on a rooftop because a man called Azriel Burns wanted me to die a public, slow death. "I will say it," I told him. "I am the murderer. I deserve this." He smiled like a judge and a pyromaniac at once. "Say it louder." So I shouted until my throat was raw, until the words were shards. I said them with the same voice I used to use for applause. "I am the murderer. I deserve this." "Good," Azriel said. "One hundred times, Leonor. One hundred times you jump, and...
"I mean, it was a joke, right? We always joked like that," I said. "You don't joke like that." Kiko Best's voice was soft but sharp in the bright corridor. "Not when it's about hurting someone." "I never meant it," I said. "I never—" "We all said stupid things," Everlee Nielsen cut in. "But we never thought—" We all thought, because that's how dorm life works. We traded lines like cheap postcards: a half-true confession here, an overblown promise there, a silly wish wrapped in the...
I always thought I knew how to celebrate a birthday. "I'll be home early," Leonardo promised over the phone. "Don't fuss. I'll make it up to you." He sounded tired, but warm, the kind of warmth I had let sink into my bones over a year. I had cooked, lit a candle, set the little table. I even hid the camera to catch his face when he saw the cake I’d ordered. Then I opened a social thread and saw a picture. Aubree Komarov was arm-in-arm with a man under a streetlamp. The post read,...
I died with my dog at my side and came back to find my life had been stolen. I thought death would be peaceful. I was wrong. "You're a mess," said the man with eyes like frozen knives as his hand closed around my throat. I gagged, saw stars, and thought about the ridiculousness of being murdered in someone else's bed on my first night in a new life. "Let go," I croaked, because of course I had to be polite even while nearly suffocating. He tightened his grip and hissed, "You dared to...
I woke to white that smelled like iron and salt and snow. The world was a single blade of cold. My first clear thought was: I am not where I belong. “I’m awake,” I whispered to the sky, though who would answer me was nonsense. Snow hissed in the trees. My hands — if they were hands — were small, shockingly furry, and useless for anything but shivering. “You alive?” someone called from the dark. I twitched. A grunt, a curse. Men’s boots in the drift. I pressed my muzzle into the snow and...
I got the call at two a.m. The rain hit the window like a drum. My phone lit up with his name: Edwin Cain. "Claudia, my stomach hurts. Can you come?" "Now?" I rubbed the sleep from my eyes. I was tired, but when he sounded small, I left without thinking. The hospital smelled like antiseptic and rain. I stepped into the night shift room and knocked. The door opened. Light. A bed. Two people. "Edwin?" I said. He looked up, startled. His face was wet with sleep or pain; I couldn't...
I woke up to the taste of iron and the sound of rain on a warped roof. I did not know my name then, not really. People called me names I did not remember wanting. They called me a madwoman, a witch, a danger to the household. I smiled the smile they expected and let them take my blood. "Drink, Princess," the doctor said then, like a man reciting orders. "One cup, warm. It will help." "It burns," I told him. I heard laughter. "You are a stubborn thing," said the man who had the right to...
"I shouldn't have trusted Kamryn," I said aloud the first night I tried to make sense of what had happened, though no one was there to hear me. "I told you to be careful," Kamryn had said the night she introduced me. "He's legit. He helped half the neighborhood. You need to sleep, Journey." "But he—" I started, and then my throat closed. I always call myself Journey when I speak in my head, like saying my full name keeps me anchored, keeps me human. "You look wrecked," Byron Leone had...
I woke up angry and in a mansion that smelled like perfume and expensive cleaning chemicals. My name is Itzel Clayton, and somebody else had been living my life so smoothly that alarms went off only when I surfaced and realized I was wearing someone else’s life. "This is not my life," I told the ceiling light, because the ceiling light was the only one who'd answer late at night. The life I stepped into belonged to a woman who had always been called a "white moonlight" in that novel...
"I don't understand," I said, squinting at the open coffin. "Why is it empty?" "It was supposed to have a body," whispered the maid I used to be. "They paid to bury her." "I won't be anyone's bait," I snapped back before I thought. "You die, you stay dead. Not on my watch." He laughed then — a soft, wrong laugh in the moonlit trees. "Twenty taels," the student said. "Do this and you will be set for life." "You wanted money for murder," I said to the two of them. "You're...
"I won't get up," I said, and pulled a pillow over my head. "Get up, Addison! You're going to be late!" Valentina grabbed the bedframe and yanked. Her twin buns bobbed. "Really, stop burying your face." I peeled the pillow back and squinted at ceiling rafters I did not own. Silk draped the window, not the cheap blinds from my last apartment on Earth. My hair—"my" hair—hung long and black across the edge of the bed like a comet tail. I wanted to be anywhere but here. "You'll be fine,"...
"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...
I still remember the photo the delivery driver sent me. "It’s at the gate. I left it by the pillar," the app text read, and the picture showed a crumpled leaflet and a thermos. I smiled and went down. I wanted a hot box of yellow-braised chicken rice for dinner. But when I reached the gate, the bag was gone. "Someone must have taken it by mistake," I told myself as I walked back toward the dorm. "A wrong order, a mix-up." I checked the building’s tiny surveillance screen the next...
