Quick reads you can finish in 10-30 minutes
Found 1964 short novels
I open my eyes to fluorescent lights and the sound of a nurse's shoes scuffing away like wind through dry leaves. "You finally woke up," the nurse says, breathless and relieved. "Your husband and son have been here for days." She hurries out before I can ask anything sensible. Finley Drake pushes the door. He looks older—sharper cheekbones, less of that teenage softness I remember. His hand is gentle as he helps me sit. "Are you okay?" he asks. His voice is the one I've been holding...
I scrubbed at my wrists until the soreness throbbed away and rolled my neck, then went back to the canvas. I had been in the studio all afternoon and into the night—no break, no dinner—until my back announced itself in aching pops. When I finally padded back to our dorm, the hallway was quiet and the little balcony at the end smelled faintly of rain and instant noodles. “Ugh,” Hazley said, flopping onto her bed when she came in. “I can’t take the mood in here lately.” “I noticed,” I said....
I have a habit of wearing simple dresses and pretending I don't notice looks. "I didn't mean to cause trouble," I said before the crowd in the dining hall could finish piling up their assumptions. "You didn't mean to? You think that's an excuse?" Joann Washington's voice cut sharp through the chatter. Her heels clicked like a warning. She was smaller than me by a couple inches but carried herself like a storm. "I didn't even know he had a girlfriend," I tried to explain again. "Lucas,...
I told myself I'd keep my cool. "I got it," I said through the phone, pinching the bridge of my nose. "You're home? Good. Just—rest." Remy Brady's voice bubbled with bravado even though it came muffled through the line. "Relax, Iliana. I can take care of myself." He could not. He had just finished his first fight after college entrance exams, and I drove to the hospital because the idea of him in a ward made me itch. The hospital corridor smelled like antiseptic and cheap...
I fell in love with a shadow. When I told my eldest brother — the one who would sit the throne — he only turned a page of his document and asked, "When you say 'fell in love,' what do you mean by 'fell'?" He wasn't thinking like the women of court. He didn't ask whether I had run after a boy at a festival or sniffed at some trivial flirtation. He didn't ask the dark guard's name. He only looked toward the high hall's shadow and said, "Send her," as if choosing a toy for a child, and the...
I had been stubborn even before I remembered being stubborn. "I don't go back," I said, mouth half full of hospital takeout, and the system blinked at me like an offended assistant. "You are the white moonlight," it said. "You must play out your role." "I ate vegetarian for years," I told it. "My lips had forgotten meat. You ruined my dinner by showing up late. No." "You will die early if you do not comply." "Then die early," I said, and meant it. The light on my forearm...
I kept my hands on the little girl's hair and listened to the thud of the kettle. The house felt too small for all the noise—my mother-in-law's voice was a sharp stone in the air, my daughter's small sobs a answered bell, and my own pulse like a drum. "Tell me," Guadalupe said, slamming a paper on the tea table, "whose child is she?" I picked up the paper without thinking. The words and the numbers leaned at me like an accusation. A paternity test. Her name at the top—Guadalupe Devine—and...
I remember standing at the altar, the lace of my wedding dress a heavy white tide around my feet, the smell of lilies and lemon-scented air from the hotel lobby in my nose. The ceremony had been going perfectly—too perfectly—and I had just placed the ring on Dane’s finger when the emcee grinned and asked, "Any objections?" "Not me," a woman's voice cut through the hall like a bell. I flinched. The whole room flinched. Dane’s face went pale as paper. Then Amelie May pushed open...
I never thought a jar of ointment and ten boxes of crayfish would be the punctuation marks of my life. "Yo, you're pregnant?" Valentina Archer said like it was a joke and a knife both. "Yes," I said. She laughed, but I tilted my chin. "It's your brother's baby. Aren't you happy to be an aunt?" There was a sound of keys in the lock. "Nicoletta—" she started, then froze when Emmett Martini walked in and heard us. He stood there, coat half-removed, a shadow in the doorway. For a...
The doorbell had been ringing for at least ten minutes. "Open up, Vernon! I know you're in there! You can cheat, but you can't hide from your dog," I shouted at the top of my lungs. "Yours truly isn't going to sit politely while you steal my property," a voice inside called back, muffled. I planted my feet harder on the hallway tiles and pressed the bell button again. The upstairs hall echoed with my holler and the soft, annoyed footsteps of other neighbors. Someone down the corridor...
1 "It stopped raining at the cemetery," I said, though my voice sounded wrong to me. "You mean it kept raining," Lorenzo snapped back on my screen, with a tiny smug streak I could hear even in text. I stared at the photo he had just posted: two faces close, neon light behind them, popcorn in hand, the caption: "Best day of the year." He had tagged a girl. He had posted the picture at the exact moment my world narrowed into one room with white sheets and bright hospital lights. "I don't...
I dragged my suitcase off the bus under a sun that felt like an oven and followed the long line like someone half-asleep. My shirt clung to my skin; the suitcase wheels rattled like they were about to fall apart. I shoved my hand beneath my shirt to pull at my bra the way a kid tries to hide when embarrassed. "Welcome to Qinyun Base!" the squad of instructors called in unison, the sound sharp as a whistle. Four in camouflage, two in dress uniforms. They snapped to salute and then watched us...
The night before my wedding, I learned a dangerous secret about people: their private thoughts sometimes leak like steam from boiling water, and for one strange hour I could hear them all. "This poor girl," the gentle house nurse kept thinking as she smoothed my hair. "She will never use what she learned in the village." I heard that voice and smiled; I did not understand what she meant yet. Then, after the ceremony, under the heavy red veil and the carved wooden bed where a prince...
"I can't believe I ran into the wrong classroom." I was breathless, skirt stuck to my knees, hair a mess, and my face bright red like I had sprinted through the sun. People stared. A teacher peered at me. "You're late," she said. "Sorry. Transfer student. Wrong room," I said, trying to bend words around my pounding heart. They clapped because the teacher asked me to introduce myself. I said what new girls always say—where I'm from, what I like, a polite bow. Then she pointed to the...
I still remember the exact time my phone vibrated the day everything changed. "He's posted," Jazmin said from the other side of the room, her voice thin with private glee. "Don't open it," I told her without looking up. "You have to." She shoved her phone toward me. I opened my feed. A photo—Camilo smiling at a girl whose face the frame only showed in profile. He looked like he always did in photos: calm, like a boy who had never been rushed. The caption read, "Three years. Only...
I am the only female high god of our scattered world. "I am the only female high god in the four seas and eight wilds," I told the officer at the precinct. "Okay, Miss—" He blinked at my tone, then smiled like he was doing a formality. "Officer, could you give us your guardian's phone number?" Twenty minutes later I sat in the back of a town car and stared at the man beside me, the one who had really bailed me out. He was all suit and patience. "You are mad," he said, half...
I was not supposed to be the center of anyone's story. "I want to confess to—Maureen Barrett from the Humanities Department," the boy on stage said into the festival microphone like it was a dare. My brain went blank. I had practiced saying "no" a thousand times to him. "No" had been my default. Then fate handed me a microphone and a whole stadium of people. The glitter sticks waved like a sea of tiny lighthouses. The boy who had pointed at me — Kenji Leroy, the captain of the tennis club...
I died in a lake with the taste of salt and metal in my mouth, and the last thing I remember was Lincoln Carter saying, "You're disgusting, Collins — you don't love yourself." Then I floated above the water and watched my whole life play like a cruel movie. "I gave them everything," he had said, light as a feather. "Why would I waste a future on someone who doesn't value herself?" I watched him at the funeral acting like a gentle, broken boyfriend. I watched my grandmother, Adelaide Dunn,...
"I call the stakes!" I shouted, fingers still sparkling with stolen coins as I pounded the wooden table. "Put down what you have. Buy or fold, quickly—I'm opening!" My voice bounced off the embroidered curtains of my chamber and into the night. The attendants around the table—girls and boys with practiced faces—played along with the ritual. They had played it every night for weeks, turning my private hall into a laughing, rowdy den where I preyed on boredom and boredom's price: jingling...
I woke up on the shortest day and thought I was already dead. "Move, hurry up, finish the work before dark," a sharp voice barked above me. My body felt like a stone. "Where…?" I tried to answer, but the world was a gray blur and my ribs ached as if knives cut through them. "Get out! What are you looking for in a graveyard?" someone sneered. "I thought there might be something—" another voice panted. Hands—bodies—weight. I pushed, couldn't see, couldn't breathe. When they left,...
