Quick reads you can finish in 10-30 minutes
Found 1964 short novels
I remember the lake like a mouth that swallowed me whole. "I told you to lock the gate," someone hissed as boots hit the rusted metal and pushed a door open. I was asleep in a narrow, cold room - or maybe I was already gone. I remember hands dragging me, ropes burning my wrists, and the sky tearing open with a single footstep. "Where is she?" a voice snapped. "I don't know! Boss said—" a man stammered and a slap silenced him. "You liar!" another voice growled. "Tell me now!" They...
"I can't sleep again," I said, tapping the ceiling like it was a drum. The old wooden house answered with that same tired groan. It had been five nights—five long nights of the ceiling reverberating, of my mattress trembling as if a storm lived above me. "You're knocking?" Aramis asked without turning, voice low and bored. I stood in the dim hallway, cigarette between two fingers, the smoke making patterns as useless as my patience. "You're not the only one who needs to rest." "You...
I came back to myself as the engine screamed and the racecar hissed to a stop. My pupils sharpened into cold slits. I clicked the phone to my ear without looking down. "August, the healer's in A City," I said, voice flat. "Great," August Bauer breathed. "I'll come right after—" "No." I cut him off. "Don't." "......" I heard him swallow. "Do me a favor and let me do this one, Gev. Give me a chance, will you?" "Not needed." My words were ice and I stepped out, the world around me...
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 remember the first time Eric Clarke walked into our campus like it was a scene on repeat. "He looks unreal," one girl whispered the day he arrived. "I know," I whispered back, but quietly, because whispering too loud felt like bragging about a secret. I was Jade Kelley then, a student with a cheap notebook and a loud heart. I fell in love the old-fashioned way: waiting in the library for an "accidental" meeting, trying to appear calm and failing spectacularly. "You okay?" he...
I remember the campus in spring like a postcard. Trees were a riot of new green and the sky was clean as if someone had washed it. I was walking with Sawyer Benjamin, hand in hand, and the sunlight made his hair look like a halo. "Did you hear?" a girl behind us said, loud enough to ricochet off the quad. "What happened?" another answered, curious. "A girl from Bio set herself on fire in the square," the first girl said, voice buzzing with the wrong sort of excitement. "Why?" the other...
"I'll die in your bed one day," he said, sleepy and rough as if the sea had lived in his throat. "I hope not," I answered, folding a T-shirt over the crumpled white blouse and dropping the ruined shirt into the laundry basket. "Don't say things like that." "You always say that." Kenji Persson sat up on the couch, messy hair, eyes rimmed with red from last night's drinks. He sounded like a kid and like a danger at once. "I have work," I said. "I have a proposal due. Tonight I don't have...
I never meant to send that message to him. "I just had the worst blind date," I typed to Katelyn, fingers flying. "Old guy, dry as toast. I couldn't even bite." Three seconds later, a new message landed in my phone. A single question mark. I stared. Then my brain did that embarrassing thing where it stacked every mortifying second of my life into a single film. I must have hit "reply all" instead of "send." My cheeks warmed in a way that heat never had before. I stared at the screen...
I woke to the sound of a distant, animal-like cry and smelled old blood and dust. I was holding someone I hated and loved and could not name with any single word—Francisco Brandt. My body ached in places I couldn't explain. My back felt raw. My head buzzed with images like a broken projector. "Stay with me," Francisco said, and his voice was a surprise—ragged, real. "Don't close your eyes." "I—" I tried to breathe and failed. "What happened?" The world I remembered had been shredded...
I woke because someone was crying. It was a low sound, kept close to the throat like a bird trying to hide a broken wing. I lay in the dark and listened. The quilt at my side carried warmth, but my bed was empty. Maxine Frank was not beside me. I did not move at first. The room was thick with fog that seemed to have slipped in through the shutters. No moon. No wind. Only the soft, cut-off sobs that tried to be silent and failed. I rose on bare feet and found her curled at the foot of...
I woke up to the smell of disinfectant and a light that was almost cruel, bright and indifferent. I opened my eyes and saw Cason Collins standing at the foot of the bed like a statue, all composed lines and the kind of certainty he'd worn since we were children. His face had its shadows — too many late nights, the odd five o'clock stubble — but his voice when he found me moving was thin with something like relief. "Franziska," he said. "You're awake." I let myself study him. "You were at...
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 died and the last call I made went straight to his voicemail. I hovered above the snow and watched my body curl into a small, defeated shape in the yard where we had grown up. My phone kept flashing beside me, "Drake Contreras" lighting the screen like an accusation. "He's calling back," I told myself, though there was no breath to make the words mean anything. "It's too late." I didn't want to die that day. The snow had been too soft, the swing's squeak too much like our childhood,...
"Since you want to live on someone else’s money, why not come ask me?" I cornered Dalton in his office and, with what I thought was a grand flourish, pulled a campus meal card from my pocket. "Beef pancakes from Cafeteria One. How many do you want? Buy as many as you like. Don't save money on me." Dalton leveled a look at the card, then at me. He was thirty, precise as a ruler, and he taught like a man who measured every pause. "You mean to support me with this?" he asked. "How much...
I did not expect to be standing in front of Lawson Reid seven years after we broke up and ask for his father’s number. Lawson looked the same and completely different. He still had that half-smile that used to make me lose my balance, but he also had the calm of someone who had learned to keep people at the correct distance. He slid a business card toward me like it was nothing. “Robinson & Blake, Partner—Lawson Reid,” he said with easy arrogance. “Reacquainting ourselves?” My throat...
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 woke up to bright white lights and a voice that said, "Sofia, you can breathe now." "Where am I?" I croaked, my throat raw. "You're safe," Drake said, hands steady on my shoulders. "You're home." "You—" I tried to hold the name, but the room blurred. "Drake?" He didn't answer like I expected. He only held me like a man afraid the world would blow me away if he let go. "You're tired," Jaelynn whispered somewhere behind him while someone lifted a towel for me. "You get cleaned....
I woke up to autumn that tasted like iron and old paper. Leaves made a gold carpet outside; inside, the room smelled of grease and stale breath. I sat on a narrow cot and blinked until the world stopped spinning. "Where am I?" I asked myself aloud. A mirror on the wall answered with a stranger’s face. Oily hair stuck to a brow that had flakes. A double chin sagged. Cheeks puffed. My pulse jumped like it had been kicked. "This is impossible," I whispered. "I am Jordan Cole, not—" But...
"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 never thought my first day as a graduate student would end with a courtroom-like scene in the chemistry building, with half the department staring and my adviser, Canon Yoshida, shrinking under questions like a caught rat. I walked to orientation because my building was close and because I still used my old flip phone. My grandfather, Professor Elijah Zaytsev, always taught me to be careful with new tech. He said, "Some things are meant to be measured, not shown." I took coins to pay the...
