Quick reads you can finish in 10-30 minutes
Found 1964 short novels
"I can't believe I'm here," I said before I opened the office door. "You're late," Grayson muttered, but his mouth curled like he was enjoying the drama. "And you uploaded a roast video again?" "I uploaded a roast video again," I admitted. "Of who this time?" someone off-camera asked, but it was just me talking into my phone. My secret account loved to roast our company. "Just a little vent. It's anonymous." "Anonymous," Grayson repeated, "but the boss liked every clip for a...
I never expected to sit in his emergency room six years after we broke up. "I need to see Conway," I said, showing the folder like a weapon. Conway Sorensen looked up from the chart as if I were a memory he had ignored for years. "Morning clinic's done. Come back this afternoon," he said without surprise. "I already paid," I told him and set the paper down, "I'm pregnant. It's yours." He blinked like someone waking from a dream he didn't want to own. "What child? We broke up six...
I remember the day I shouted it like a spell. "Strange things change, but odd things do not!" I cried, pushing through Fox Cervantes without thinking. "Whoa? You too?" a voice answered, and the world narrowed to the hand that reached for mine. "You remember Volume 184 of that history book?" Vicente Crawford asked me, voice small and urgent. "I can't remember. I couldn't sleep for two nights." "Uh..." I blinked. "If you can't remember, just stop trying." He squeezed my hand; his...
"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...
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...
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...
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...
“Are you all right?” a girl asked as rain slapped my face. I opened my eyes to her voice and a white dress dripping over my knees. She was closer than I expected. Her hand was on my wrist, warm and steady. “Did a car—” she said, but the rest fell into the sound of horns and the rain. I pushed myself up and blinked the world back into focus. The city smelled of wet concrete. My skull throbbed. The girl’s brown eyes were wide. Her hair stuck to her forehead. “You’re soaked. Do you...
I was the rumor people loved to sharpen like knives. "You don't have to hear this, Isabelle," my father said the night I first moved back into the house he called his. "You're complicating things." "Complicating things?" I repeated. "Wade, I am your daughter. Which part of that is complicated?" He looked away. Stefania Davis, with the same slow, soft voice that had once erased the woman who raised me, smiled like she had never had to choose sides. "Sweetheart, maybe now isn't the...
"I paid for a voice and woke up with a life." "You're dramatic." "I told you, Knox, you sounded like someone who owned an ocean." "Do you want another bedtime story or do you want me to keep humming?" "I want both." My phone glowed in the dark. I had my blanket wrapped to my chin and my throat a little raw from crying. The summer I moved into Aunt Corinne's apartment to study for the big exam, I didn't expect much except quiet and a strict schedule. I found the app because I...
“Mom, don’t die, Mom…” I open my eyes to a small face streaked with dirt and dried tears looking down at me like I am a miracle. “Mom, are you awake?” I try to speak. My throat is cotton. My body is like a sack of stones. The roof is black, the walls a hard brown clay. The air smells like old bread. A child’s hand curls into my shirt and I feel a tiny heartbeat against my ribs. “I’m here,” I whisper. “I’m here.” Her name is Ivory. She’s three. She wants to give me a sugar cube as...
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 can't breathe," I say, and the snow bites my cheeks. They're shouting. Someone throws an egg. Someone else spits a smear of vegetable on my sleeve. "Shame her! Shame her!" a woman screams. I try to tear the cloth from my mouth. "I'm not—" I can't say the words. My mouth is full of rags. "She wanted my husband!" the woman next to me roars. "She wanted my man!" "Stop!" a man's polished shoe lands at my head. "We won't have such shame here." A dozen hands. A dozen...
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 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 woke to a broken sky and pain like iron stitching through my skull. "Is she breathing?" a coarse voice asked somewhere close. "Good riddance if she's dead," another voice said, mean and flat. "Don't say that. If the marquis asks, we'll say we went out and couldn't find her," the first voice muttered. I closed my fingers and felt my own blood. My head throbbed. Someone had said "marquis," and the name rolled like a stone inside me. I tried to remember the kitchen, the pressure...
"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 remember the winter the world felt hard as old wood and thin as paper. I was eighteen when my mother sold me for five silver coins and the cart rumbled me into Elias Longo’s life. “My girl,” my mother had said as she smoothed the cheap cotton of my only new jacket. “Dani says five coins is what it takes. Don’t blame me. It’s the match or nothing.” Her voice cracked like the cold air. I hid my hands in my sleeves. Frost had cracked the skin between my fingers; they stung and itched. I...
I never thought a photograph could call me back into the world. I never thought a photograph could bring him back. "You sure this place is safe?" Armani stuck out her lip as she shrugged off her coat. "Floyd, your pick was a mess. They almost recognized us downstairs." "Don't call me Floyd," the singer said, taking Armani's cap and draping it over his arm with theatrical patience. "I'm Floyd, the man of mystery. And yes, fans hearing my voice has ruined more nights than you...
I turned twenty-eight on a rainless Monday and made a small wish into the dark ceiling of my one-room apartment. "I wish for one different life," I whispered, "one strange trip. Just once." A light like a camera flash hit my eyelids and a soft voice answered, "Granted." "I—" My last thought was the shape of a glowing bubble, the size of a marble, humming at my breath. Then black. When I opened my eyes again, the bubble floated in front of me and said, "I am the Wish System. The...
