Quick reads you can finish in 10-30 minutes
Found 1964 short novels
"I am awake," I croaked, and the copper mirror gave me a false smile. "I thought you would sleep longer," Half-Summer said, fussing with the sleeve at my wrist. I pushed my hair back with careful, tiny fingers. "Half-Summer, tell me straight. Who has been taking my gifts?" Half-Summer bowed, eyes wide. "Miss Elsa, Miss Margherita brought Prince Dolan and they went through your room—" "She took them," I finished, tasting the word like an old belt. "Good. Then she will give them...
"I wake up with a headache." That was the first thing I said out loud, and the room answered with the cold smell of disinfectant and the soft hum of machines. "You're awake!" a small voice shouted. "Sister, you're awake!" Bodhi burst into the little hospital room like an explosion of hope. He was six, all knobby knees and wet cheeks, clutching my hand as if it might float away. "Who are you?" I asked, and then looked at my hands. They were slender and pale. The bandage on my...
I count days like prisoners count stones. "Two hundred seventy-five days, six hours, thirty-seven minutes," I muttered, my voice small in the cold ward. "Not a single one of them was deserved." "Number forty-six, med time!" a nurse barked, the words like metal. I sat on the iron bed, knees drawn up, the mattress groaning under me. Around me, the ward buzzed with nervous songs and half-finished games. They called them patients. They called me patient number forty-six. I called myself...
"Open the door, Madam Cheng! Open up!" I sat bolt upright and stared at the yard outside the thin patched curtain. My throat was dry. My head felt like it had been scrubbed and emptied and then packed with someone else's memory. "Who—?" I croaked. My hand landed on a round, warm belly. It wobbled like a sack of rice. "Oh no," I said. "No. No, no, no." "Who is it?" a woman called from the yard. Her voice was quick with worry. I threw the cloth aside and found a water jar. I...
The subway smelled like old coffee, wet metal, and the kind of fear you could count on the fingers of your hand. I set my watch anyway. "Five minutes," I told myself for the seventy-ninth time. "Five minutes and then—" Someone laughed near the door. Claire Fernandez adjusted her skirt and rolled her eyes. "You always do that, Sebastian. What's the point?" "It's a habit," I said. "A bad one." "Then forget it," Claire muttered, but she smiled. The smile was automatic, the way people...
Part One — The Aunt Who Came to Stay "My name is Jenna Bailey. I make tiny clay animals and two-head cartoon figures in a loft with a ladder to the bedroom. I like my toys lined up on half a wall. I like quiet. I liked my life until my aunt moved in." "I told Mom, 'Why did Helene bring the kid?'" "Mom answered, 'Your uncle and his wife work far away; there's no one to look after him.'" Helene Kuenz arrived like a gust of opinionated wind, hair carefully done, voice loud with...
"Footsteps stopped just below my eyes." I looked up. A pair of polished shoes, then a tall shadow filled the doorway. "Amaya, are you hurt?" Valentina's agent, Claire, said before I could. Her voice had that practiced care actors use for cameras. "I—" I tried to answer, my throat dry. "I didn't mean to. Do you believe me?" Jaxson Thomas didn't move. He stood like a statue, suit sharp, face colder than the clinic lights. "How is she?" he asked finally. "Her palms are cut. The...
I have always been a lucky person. "I mean, ridiculously lucky," I told Gillian as we shoved another box into the spare room. "Like college-by-a-hair lucky." Gillian laughed and tripped over a stack of canned soup. "You and your luck. You sure you didn't buy a rabbit's foot on Taobao?" "I bought a lot of rabbit's-foot-shaped things," I said. "But nothing worked as well as timing." "Then don't mess with timing now," she said, sliding lids into a crate. "If the world cracks, your...
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 was born the noon my mother died. They said it was proof of fate — a bitter circle sealed by a dying woman and the cold moon. They named me for a broken lotus in a muddy pond: Isabela Fitzpatrick. The name settled on my skin like a bruise. "You give in to him, Isabela. You want power, don't you?" Cason Bowling had said that to me later, red-eyed and trembling like a man who could not imagine himself humbled. "I'll give you a seat in the palace. Be my queen. Call me brother once more,...
1 I was nine when the first terrible night happened. "It will be all right. Don't make a sound." Elena whispered, her face wet with tears. She shoved me toward the bedroom window before she locked her fingers on mine. "No matter what, you stay quiet. Promise me." "I promise." I was small enough to squeeze through the iron bars. I could hear the living room door slam. Someone was banging on the bedroom door. Hard. "Who is it?" came a man’s voice low and sharp. "Open! Open this...
I woke with my hands numb and my mouth full of river water. I spat, choked, and then laughed because the face in the mirror was thirteen again. "My god," I breathed. "I have a second chance." "Miss?" Ma'er's voice trembled. "You're awake. You—" "I am awake," I cut in, but softer. "Tell me everything, now." Ma'er told me the small things first — snow on the courtyard, the punishment for the boy who had knocked over the incense, the new woman in my father's house. Her tears were...
I will say it clearly from the start: I was the one who told. "I told them she was planning to run," I say to myself at night when the room is quiet. "You told on her?" Greta Nielsen asks one morning, spooning soup into her mouth as if it has nothing to do with me. "Yes." I fold my hands around the bowl. "She would have been caught. It was better." Greta laughs like it's nothing. "You did well. Half a chicken from Cedric, didn't you get that?" "I did." I remember the scent of...
I woke up in another life with my hands stained by cold dust and my cheeks wet from tears that weren't mine. "Don't call him my son," my father snapped as if the words could carve a separate world. "I will not!" I answered, but the voice felt thin in my mouth. Someone pushed, someone shouted, and I remembered the two struck palms between my father and that ragged man — the pact not finished. A hand came down toward my face. I shut my eyes and fainted. When I opened them, a quilt...
I remember the first thing I saw after death: the inside curve of a lamp, a thin chill through my ribs, and a face I had once trusted smiling as if nothing had happened. "You're awake," the voice said. "Of course I'm awake," I answered. "Would I ever sleep through an opportunity?" He laughed softly. "You look the same, Nova." "I do not." "I know," he said. "That's why you are interesting." I am Nova Crouch. I was made into the bone with a slow, surgical cruelty — a fan cut...
I woke up with the taste of iron on my tongue and hands that belonged to a different life. "Monica," someone said, voice low and patient. "Are you awake?" I stared at the face over me—Avery Mahmoud's face—but when my hand flew to my throat to steady my breath, the fingers were mine. Not his. My heart kicked as if it had been hit with a mace. "Are you hurt?" the face asked again. "It hurts," I said, and the voice that came out was his. I looked down and saw the heavy cloak, the...
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 woke to the same metallic chair and the same cool rail under my palms. The speaker in the corner sang in that syrupy voice I’d heard all my life. “Dear citizen of the Free World, system notice: you have been awake for thirty minutes. Please enjoy Sweet Dream and avoid unpleasant emotions. Enjoy the pleasures of the Free World.” I rolled my fingertips over the chair’s arm like a man testing a new tool. “Pleasures of the Free World?” I muttered, so quiet no one would think me...
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...
