Quick reads you can finish in 10-30 minutes
Found 1964 short novels
I flipped a coin on a kitchen table that smelled like old tea and sterilized bandages. "I'll go if the ship side shows," I told the air. "Heads—I'll go. Tails—I'll stay." The coin spun. I watched it like I watched people's faces for a living: searching for truth in a small, turning thing. "It landed heads," I said to the photograph of Mom. My voice was thin. "So I go." The contest poster on the square had promised a first prize of fifty million star-credits, plus room and board from...
“I spat blood.” “Elora, what are you doing?” Mina’s voice broke the snow and my ribs. “I’m done waiting, Nicolas.” I tasted metal and the words came out like a vow. “Nine lives. Nine times. I’m done.” Mina knelt, trembling. “Miss—don’t say that.” I laughed without joy. “Do you know what it is to stitch a wedding dress with your own hands while your heart sews itself to a man who does not love you?” My fingers were numb from the needle. “Do you know what it is to let him go eight...
"I won," I shouted into my phone, breath still shaking. "Who else could have done this?" I laughed to the empty car. They had called my name on stage. Five awards. I had touched the sky. The next moment there was glass and metal and a bright, wrong light. "I need to delete my messages," I told myself, even as the world tipped. "I can't let them read that," I tried to wipe the screen. Then everything faded. I woke to a low ceiling and the smell of wood smoke. "Where am...
1 "I don't want fuss," I told Jensen as she fussed with my sleeve. "Not fuss?" Jensen scoffed. "You are a princess; fuss is the family profession." "I mean real fuss. No screaming, no running into the courtyard. Let them kneel in the main hall. If they won't, have the guards take them," I said. Jensen gave me a look that mixed pity with excitement. "You are calm," she said. "Too calm, my lady." "I am tired," I said. "Lift me to my bed. Let them wait until I rise." I lay down under three...
I was always louder than I needed to be. "I am Autumn Garcia," I said to the little camera in the campus square, tilting my head, smiling the kind of smile that had taken me centuries to practice. "Why not? Why shouldn't I be?" The student reporter blinked and asked, "Do you think you're the most beautiful student at Southdance University?" "I..." I let my chin dip, let my laugh come out soft. "How could I not be?" "Then what about Bella? What do you think of Bella...
I remember the heat that summer night like a bruise. "Bethany, hurry," my stepmother barked from the kitchen doorway, and Khloe laughed at something on her phone. "If you're not packing, you'll miss the taxi." "I said I'm almost done," I answered, clutching a small tote of folded clothes. I heard my father's boots on the stairs and hoped this chore would end tonight — hoped it wasn't another debt he couldn't face. "Three million," I overheard my stepmother say into the phone, voice...
I was in line for a swab when I realized the tester in full protective gear was my ex. "Is this really necessary?" I said, half to the man in the suit, half to myself. "Open," Jackson said, and his voice was the same soft, practiced thing I used to love and hate. "Breathe." "Too deep!" I whimpered like a child. "Please be gentle." "Is it deep?" Jackson smiled with just his eyes visible above the mask and then—like he had done a thousand times before—he pushed the swab farther and...
"I didn't expect you to forget," I said. Wade's face didn't change. He had the same patient calm he'd carried for seven years. It was the look that had made me fall in love with him back when he had nothing and sold flowers on winter nights. It was the look that had made me lend him my future when he asked. "I'm sorry," he said. "There was a—" "There was a meeting," I supplied, because I already knew the sentence. "There was a client. There was a promise to the men." "Valeria," he...
I remember the first time someone called me "green tea" like it was the sound of a distant bell. "You green tea?" Colby asked me once, the word laced with genuine confusion. He blinked, entirely innocent, and then added, "Do you think I'm green tea, too?" "No," I said too loudly, because my mouth always betrayed my heart before my brain could get in line. "Of course not." He narrowed his eyes at me, mischief softening his face. "Then why are you so sure about me?" "Because you...
"My husband is dead," I said. "He's in our bed with another woman." "I thought you said you were away for work?" Sebastian asked, voice flat like a scalpel. "I was," I said. "I flew back the afternoon he died." "I need you to tell me everything from the moment you got home," Sebastian Carroll said. "Start at the door." "I opened the front door and the smell hit me," I said. "Rot and blood. I opened windows. I called Silas, then I called the police." "Silas?" he...
I never thought I would trade sulking for a keyboard, but there I was, typing the second my sister stole yet another boyfriend. "Again?" I said to myself, hands hovering over the keys. "Again, Mae?" "Stop calling her that," my roommate Maja would say later, but that afternoon I sat in our tiny dorm and typed like a person possessed. "He's not mine," I typed into a draft. "He was never mine." "You look serious," Maja said from the doorway. "What's up?" "I'll show her," I said....
"I almost spilled tea on the general." I say it loud enough to make everyone look up. My hands are still warm from the cup. The courtyard is full of midmorning light. Granny Florence Guo is seated like a small bright moon on her chair. Father, Leonardo Avery, huffs and smiles without much humor. Around us, servants rustle. My chest tightens and I force a laugh. "Miss Isabela," Katherine Butler says softly from the chair across, "you should not stand there with hot tea." "Thanks," I...
I still remember the taste of the soup my mother shoved into my cold hands the day everything shifted. "You eat," she said, voice thick with a joy that felt borrowed from someone else's life. "You can't starve yourself." "I won't," I lied, clutching the bowl like a thin shield. We had guests that evening—people polite enough to lower their voices, people who smelled of new suits and older secrets. They left in a hurry; their footsteps skimmed the floor like discarded pages. When the...
I never knew, until the night my body split open and three warm little mouths found me, that I was not fully human. "Mother, you can't keep them on the bed, the quilt will be ruined," Helena said, her voice equal parts worry and exasperation. "That's the only winter quilt you have left." "They're my children," I said, cradling a squirming grey pup. "How can you call them anything else?" Helena looked at me like someone who had watched the palace swallow a noble family and spit out...
I never thought a marriage certificate could feel like a second skin I had to wear because someone else had vanished. "I married Nolan because my sister was gone," I say that sentence now like it's a broken record. "You married me because you needed a substitute." I had wanted to spit those words the day he made me sign. Instead I signed, because a bargain had been struck that tied my family's life to theirs. "Happy first anniversary, wife," his secretary had whispered to me that morning,...
I met him five years after my world split in two. "I thought you were dead," I said the first time I saw him in a meeting room light. He blinked once, looked at me like I was a small, amusing interruption, and smiled the kind of polite smile that lives in company brochures. "That kind of pick-up is tired, Miss Kenna. Why don't you skip the drama?" My hand found the hollow behind his ear before I even realized what I was doing. A small bump lived there, a familiar ridge I had traced a...
I am Tatiana Girard. I am a princess. For two days I have almost not eaten. "Princess," my maid Sophia Abbott would whisper every mealtime, "you must try." "I can't," I would answer, lowering my chopsticks for the hundredth time. "Father comes at meal times." "Your father?" she would ask, frowning. "Again?" "Always," I said. "He asks the same thing every time." "He asks you where the Empress is?" Sophia's voice was soft, like cloth sliding. "Yes." I set the bowl down. "Again...
They told me grief gets quieter with time. They lied. Ten years after the night that tore my life into two halves, a sound I had sworn I would never hear again woke me at midnight: the marimba ringtone. The old phone in the battered leather trunk that smelled of perfume and dust vibrated like a trapped insect. I stared at it, then at Willem. He had stood, the ritual finished, and gone to the kitchen to warm milk—his way of making ritual into motion, as if movement could keep sorrow from...
I never planned to be brave. I planned to survive. That was the difference. "You smell like smoke," Bram Luna said the first time I tried to comfort him. "Good," I answered, because lying was easier than explaining. "Someone's gotta be worse off than me." He stared at me the way frost stares at a winter river — cold, sharp, and as if any warmth was an insult. He had a wheelchair then, a halo of pity around him, and the look told me to keep it at arm's length. "Move," he said, and...
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...
