Quick reads you can finish in 10-30 minutes
Found 1964 short novels
"I didn't drown," I said, because saying it made my throat less heavy. "Then why are you green around the eyes?" Flynn smiled and leaned closer. "You look... wrong. Did you not sleep? Did someone pour bad tea on you?" "You're enjoying this," I said. "Am I?" Flynn Henry tilted his head. "Claire, I—" "Don't call me that," I snapped. "Call me my name properly. Call me Claire Fitzgerald." He blinked like a child and then, with a softness that used to be rare in him, answered,...
The first day I died, he brought his first love home. They kissed on the sofa I had bought. They ate the celery dumplings I had learned to make for him. They laughed with the game console I had wrapped for his birthday. I floated by the ceiling like a bad lightbulb—clear, useless, and too close to everything. I wanted to scream at them to stop. I wanted to shove the lamp off the table, to clap my transparent hands over her mouth. But I couldn't touch them. I couldn't change the sound of...
"Tell me your name." The fluorescent light hummed. Papers rustled. I watched the dark ink of Jin Ashford's pen move across the form, and for a second I forgot why I was there. "Elena Spencer." He didn't look up. He kept writing. He always kept his face like a curtain—almost neat, almost polite. Even in uniform he had a careful distance I never could cross without tripping over my own feet. "You can describe what happened." His voice was flat, official. It sounded like a door...
The grandfather clock in the living room struck twelve and the heavy chime felt like a fist in my chest. I sat on the sofa and checked the time by habit. "Ryder should be back by now," I told the empty room. "He's always late," I murmured, and the house answered with silence. I am Emily Koenig. I grew up inside a clinic of herbs and steam, raised by my master—Declan David—who treated me as a daughter and taught me his whole life. "Medicine first," he used to say. "Hold to the formula, but...
I remember the wind that night as if it were a living thing, clawing through cracked glass, shredding sound into screaming ribbons. "You can't die, Alicia," he kept yelling at me. "You promised—stay with me!" "I can't," I whispered, even as the world thinned, even as my skin felt like tissue and then nothing. "Rafael, live. Take my piece of this world and live." He didn't let go. The boy I had warmed for eight years clung to me like a drowning thing. I had spent a decade being an actor...
The first time Avianna died in my arms, Grant was at a rooftop party celebrating some girl's birthday. "You promised you'd come," I said once, through tears, when his voice finally reached me like a distant echo. "It was just—" he began, and then the line went dead. I held Avianna's small, warm body, the bell on her wrist chiming once, and the world narrowed to that one ringing sound and the coldness of a hospital roof. Then I jumped. I woke up to my twenty-third birthday. The cake...
"I can't feel the fever anymore," I said, blinking at the sun like it had surprised me. "You look like you rolled down the hill," Luca Khan said, hands in his pockets, voice flat as winter stone. "It was steep," I managed. "Who—who are you?" "You should be asking where you were going at all in that state." He sounded stern, like the kind of man who judged angles and motives. "I'm Luca." "I—Kylie," I answered, because it felt right. "Kylie Carter. Thank you." "You should go see a...
1 "I have fifteen slides," I told the conference room, "and I will finish in twenty minutes." "Please," the assistant nodded, eyes already on the clock. "You got this, Elliott." "I got this," I said, and my phone in my suit pocket began to buzz like a trapped bee. I listened to the buzzing through four slides, through discussion of margins and churn. I flipped my hand once, plainly, kept talking. The phone buzzed again, seven missed calls from Alexis, a stack of WeChat messages with...
I died in fire and flew above my own ruin like a thin strip of smoke. "You need to wake up," I told myself, but I could not wake. "My son," I watched him chant the little lines we taught, small fingers clenching and unclenching. "He says Mama," the boy whispered, and his voice cut through me like glass. "I can reach him," I tried to touch him. "But my hand passed through his cheek." I could see everything. I could see Daphne Nielsen's long nails tighten around the child's neck...
I pushed the hotel door and rain hit my shoulders like a cold hand. "I'll be up," I told my phone, voice small in the elevator. The man waiting outside the lift looked at me. He wore a dark suit and did not smile. He had the same dry calm I had learned to avoid. My throat closed. "You're soaked," he said. His voice was even. It was Court Bennett. "I—" I stopped. I said nothing. I slid my thumb across my screen and pretended to read a message. Court's eyes did a quick scan, then...
I am sitting on the edge of Lorenzo Blanc's bed, the divorce papers warm from the printer on the coffee table, and my hands are shaking. "You're going to Germany?" I ask, holding my phone like a verdict. "Come," Lorenzo says. "You come now." "Why now? Why on your flight?" I snap. "Because you sent me the papers," he replies. "Because you thought you could leave by text." "Leave by text? I—" I close my mouth. "I sent a draft. I wasn't trying to—" "You tried," he cuts in. His...
I never thought my first sentence to him would be, "Wanna?" and that the question would change so much. He was leaning against the elevator wall like he owned the air, like his height rented space and his dark eyes collected light. I leaned my hip to the corridor tile, lit a cigarette, and let it blur my face into someone dangerous for a couple of hours. The bar upstairs smelled like cheap perfume and bravado. He grinned when I said it. "Upstairs or next door?" he asked, like he already...
"I stubbed it out." I pressed the cigarette into the ashtray like I could press the whole mess away. "You did that fast," Cillian said from the doorway. He stood there in a towel, water beading at his hairline, looking nothing like the man who had left at dawn. He looked like trouble that could afford a suit. "Fast is cheaper," I said. "And cleaner." He watched the smoke curl. "You should stop." "I stopped when you said 'stop' once," I said. "You don't get to order me like a...
I wake to the sound of silk tearing and a voice that tastes like ice. "How dare you eat Yao's medicine fruit?" a man says, cold enough to freeze my bones. "It's not true—she made me eat it," I gasp, clutching at my belly while the world tilts. Blood tastes metallic in my mouth. My head spins, but a small, whining voice answers for the other side. "Sister, she stole the fruit," Emery says, soft and trembling, pressed like a frightened bird against Kenneth's chest. He holds her...
I remember the day he promised to marry me as if it were a clean, bright scar. The words were light, and the world around us tilted on a hinge made of an impossible future. Then the white-faced woman who had left for study abroad stepped off an airplane and smiled into my life like she had always owned it. "Giselle," he said that night, and his voice folded like paper into a drawer. I kept my smile anyway. "You don't have to leave," I told her, though she already had the house key in...
I remember the card first: a cheap, laminated idol photo with a hand-drawn star and a moon on the back. I kept it in my school pencil case like a secret treasure. I would take it out at night and whisper to it until the dark didn't seem so deep. "Who are you whispering to?" my foster mother barked once, grabbing my hair as if I asked for bread. "It’s mine." I said, and the truth of that sentence cost me another bruise. "You think you were born for better things?" she spat. "You’re a...
"Sign it." He pushed the pen across the table like he owned my hands. "Take it," I said. "Take whatever you want. Just leave me my life." Sebastien Olivier's face didn't change. He folded his long fingers around the document and smiled with no warmth. "You'll sign, Avianna," he said. "You sign, and I'll make sure you're set for life. I'll make sure you keep the title—Mrs. Olivier—if that matters." I stood up slow. My legs didn't shake. My throat did. "You loved me at all in...
"Slap!" I remember the sound like a door shutting in my skull. "Don't you dare mouth off," the old woman hissed, spitting words like stones. "You are cursed, you worthless thing. You will marry whether you live or die. Get her to the wood shed. Lock it." I rubbed the burning line across my cheek and blinked up at the gray face leaning over me. Her clothes were patched and dusty. Her teeth were yellow and sharp when she smiled with cruelty. "Who are you?" I asked even though the...
I remember the yellow sweater first. It was the color of early sun and the kind of thing that hushed everyone in our yard when Lillian put it on. “I made this,” she said with the small, exact pride that belonged to her. “It suits me.” I listened and told myself not to care. “Mom, hurry and feed the pigs!” my father called from the yard. “They’re noisy and the matchmaker’s almost here.” “I’ll get Xiao—” Mother started and then stopped. She gestured me quieter, “I’ll put these away. You go...
I woke up to the smell of antiseptic and someone's awkward kindness. "You're awake," a man said. "Don't talk yet. Breathe slowly." I tried to answer and a nurse shushed me like a child. My throat felt like gravel. "What day is it?" "Two days after surgery. I—" he swallowed. "I stayed." He was always good at small confessions. I looked at his face and didn't know it as well as I thought I did. It was Tomas Garnier's face, the same hands that tied my shoelaces for me, the same...
