Quick reads you can finish in 10-30 minutes
Found 1964 short novels
The city was rotten with rain that night — heavy, clawing sheets that blurred streetlights into smeared halos. I hovered like a pale thought above the wet pavement, watching my own body crumpled and still beneath a smear of headlights. I knew, with a clarity that hurt, that my life had ended in a violent, ridiculous way. "I… I died?" I breathed, though the sound meant nothing to anyone. Everything was thin and distant, like a song played under water. People shouted somewhere; there were...
"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 woke up to canvas above my face and a voice like a blade. "Don't pretend to sleep, Hadassah," the woman's voice said. "The Marshal has ordered you presented to the troops." I sat bolt upright. My hands were cuffed—an iron band around my wrist—and my hair was piled into someone else's neat style. A soldier's cloak had been draped over me like punishment. The mirror across the tent showed a face I had read about a hundred times: willow brows, red mouth, eyes that always seemed on the...
"I wake up to a man's hand on my throat." I flinch and twist. The room smells of cheap cologne and stale wine. A light is in my eyes. Flash cameras blink like a swarm of flies. "Pull the camera in! The sponsor wants his money's worth!" someone shouts. "I told you, he's old. Get his face," another voice laughs. I throw my foot. The old man's hand slips. I grab his wrist and snap it. "Ah!" He screams like an animal. "What's happening?" a photographer cries. "Security!" They...
I never thought a single ridiculous day could change everything. "I told you to run faster," I muttered to myself as I sat on the cold toilet floor, willing my stomach to stop twisting. "Great start to university." "You're going to miss assembly," my roommate warned at the dorm door. I bolted. Of course, I was five minutes late. "Report!" the drill sergeant yelled when I finally arrived, cheeks flaming. "Report!" I repeated, embarrassed. "Sing!" he barked. "And you," he...
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 woke with a mouth full of cold air and the memory of a dream like a knife. "You promised," a man's voice had said in the dream. "What was done to you will be repaid a thousandfold." I sat up and found my room still dark. My heart thudded in my chest like a caged bird. The dream felt like a warning and a memory at once. That morning, Father, Gunther Brown, and I rode to the academy together. The carriage slowed when it struck someone on the road. A pale, pretty face looked back at us,...
"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 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 did not mean to tumble through a cave and land at the center of everybody’s gossip, but that is exactly how my week began. "I fell," I said aloud at the street, because sometimes it helps to tell a story out loud, "and the sky fell with me." People laughed. They did not hear the part about the cave swallowing me or the bright seam of light that spit me out like a coin. They only saw the clothes I wore, the pendant at my throat, and a face they had never seen before. "Where are you...
I am Evelyn Browning. I was called "Number Eleven" before I learned my name. I remember a cold bed, wires taped to my small arms, lights that smelled like batteries, and a man who called himself Professor Denis. "Number Eleven," he said into a recorder, "age five years, six months, nine days." "Mind control test: SSS," another voice read out. "Physical: SSS," a woman added. "Memory: SS," someone else murmured. "Pain threshold: zero…" Professor Denis trailed off as he watched me...
"I woke up to a man's humming." I blinked hard. My world smelled like warm bread and lavender soap. My ears — soft, pink, furred — flattened in surprise. A warm hand cradled my small back. "Hey, little one, don't hide," the man said. His voice was low and gentle. I scrambled under the bed. "Who—who are you?" My voice came out a tiny squeak. He laughed, a slow kind laugh. "You're safe. Come out, Emma. Your fur will get dirty." "Emma?" I whispered. My paws curled tighter. No one...
"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 have been looking for my ordinary husband for ten years, and then I found the Highest God, and he looked like the man I loved. "He cannot see the hurts you've gathered," a child of the mountain hissed as she pulled my arm so hard it cut. "Who let you into the High Court?" "I came for an answer," I said. "I came to ask where Desmond is." The god stood like a peak of white jade, sunlight tangled in the clouds behind him. He had the same face Desmond had — the same mouth shaped to smile...
"I woke up with my head pounding and a cotton taste in my mouth." "Where am I?" I whispered. The room was too bright for morning. The sheets smelled faintly of cedar. My hand flew to the back of my skull and met a hard, warm bump. "Ow," I said. Someone rolled across the floor. The sound of a wheelchair clicked like a metronome. "Who are you?" I asked again, louder. A pair of polished shoes came into view. A man in black with a neat three-to-one hair part sat in a wheelchair,...
"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 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...
I remember the smell of the old house before the words did. "Grandma," I said, kneeling by the bed as if proximity could pull her back from somewhere far and thin, "what are you saying? A qilin? Three beasts? Stop being silly." She smiled in a way that made the skin on my hands prickle. "Eleanor," she said softly, "you were born with them. I only waited to tell you until I could not wait any longer." The white cat on the windowsill blinked at me, utterly ordinary except for how it...
I remember the thunder the night my sister ran, and how the rain made everything seem like a different world. "My sister has fled!" my mother cried as she burst into the courtyard. "Emmeline is gone. She took a servant and disappeared." I looked up from my chessboard. I had been bent over patterns and problems as I always was. My fingers smelled of lacquer and ink from the carved pieces I loved. I heard the words, felt the rush of panic, then the plan unfold in my family's faces. "You...
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...
