Quick reads you can finish in 10-30 minutes
Found 1964 short novels
They read the imperial edict aloud in the main hall, and the chancellor's lady—my stepmother in every meaning but name—rose so fast she sent the tray of incense clattering to the floor. She came at me with a fan in hand and struck my face with the flat of it. "Jaylee Schulze," she spat, "your sister is dead. You will not gloat. You will not pretend to be pleased." I held my cheek where it burned and let the hall watch me collect myself. "Do you think I am pleased?" I asked. "No. I am...
I opened my phone and the username hit me like a cold wave: "BlaineHomeWife." The videos filled the screen—hands, shoulders, a back in motion, a smile that never showed me entirely. My heart tried to fit a face into the blank space in my head, and it did. "I have a husband?" I said to the empty hospital room. A nurse laughed softly at the doorway. "Yes. He says you're home now." "What's his name?" "You called him Blaine when you woke up." The words were small, but when the name...
I remember the first thing I tasted when I woke up in the hospital: salt and bitter medicine. "You can cough," my mother said, voice thicker than usual. "You were very lucky, Elise." I kept my eyes closed. "Who pulled me out of the water?" I asked after a long breath. "Jacob carried you," she answered. "He said you had drifted ashore and he found you. He—" "Jacob?" The name felt like a flat stone in my mouth. He had been my neighbor and the boy who lived beside my every memory...
I cough until the room spins. "Cordelia, you shouldn't push yourself," Grace says, lowering my sleeve and pressing a cup of warm broth to my lips. "I'll be fine," I answer, but my voice is thin as paper. "Tell me straight—where has he been?" Grace bites her lip, glancing toward the corridor as if Chance might appear from the shadows and hear the word "he." She steadies herself and says, "My lady… the lord of Chance House—Chance—left for the western road some nights ago. He did not...
I had finished a double shift and felt like a battery that had been used and put back on the shelf. "Another long day," I said to myself as I pushed the hospital door open. "Take care, Ian," Dale called from the nurses' station. "Don't pull any more all-nighters." "I'll try," I answered, but I didn't try very hard. Night shifts clung to me like a second skin. I set the navigation to the restaurant my parents liked. "Private kitchen, quiet, good food," they had said. "Your father's...
I remember the first time I realized home could be a stairway that only went up for someone else. "My feet are cold at night," Kaelynn said once, soft and small, like a wish that always seemed to come true for her. "Then ask Mom to buy a warmer blanket," I said, and I meant it as a suggestion. I didn't know then that her words would make me trade a proper room for a storage closet. "Mom," Kaelynn called from the bedroom one evening when I was ten, "Lainey snores. I can't...
I woke to a strange ceiling stitched with fabric and a chill that had nothing to do with weather. I said the first thing that came to me and it sounded perfectly ordinary in my mouth. "I want to leave," I told the man lying beside me. He turned, slow as a creature that had slept too long. "Why?" he asked, voice like someone unused to hurry. "I think there's a ghost in the house," I said, and pointed at the rafters as if the beams might confess. He blinked. "Nonsense. I've lived here...
I remember the rain like a curtain the day the old man in the family photos stopped breathing. "I don't understand why everyone came dressed like it's a coronation," I said, though no one was listening to me. Flynn Buchanan stood very still by the grave, pale as the marble tablet, and even the rain seemed to avoid him. He looked at the photograph—an old man who had been a fortress in my life—and his face held no grief I could read. I had married Flynn half a year before in a marriage of...
I was scrolling through a feed full of noise when the headline hit like a stone. "Ethan Leone and Esme Kobayashi—Spotted Holding Hands." "New CP Sparks Fans: Ethan x Esme!" "Was Kamryn Left Behind?" I froze. My thumb hovered. The photo showed Ethan smiling, his fingers curled around Esme's hand. The two of them looked like they had stepped out of someone else's dream—intimate and deliberate. I looked at the time. I had been on a late train returning from a short trip to see my...
My name is Ariya Evans. I had a steady job offer—thirty thousand a month, benefits, a room to stay in—and a boss with a face like a calm sea. I thought that was love, or at least luck paying off. Then my father's skull was put on a tray and shoved in front of me. I remember the moment I walked through the glass door of Number Seven Café the way you remember the first cold bite of winter: clear and impossible to ignore. "Welcome," the receptionist said, bored enough to make a statue...
"I keep seeing the girl's face," Karsyn said the first time she told me. "I can't un-see it," she added, and her voice was thin like paper. "Show me," I said. "Bring me the clip." "Cooper," she whispered, "I already looked dozens of times. You need to be sure." She sat across from me in the break room. The light over the table made a half-circle on her forehead. She had worked on those review stations for years; a thousand private scenes did not make her flinch. She had a steady,...
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 was born into a house that taught me how to be invisible. "You look fine," my sister said the morning I woke with blood in my eye. Her voice was like dry paper folding over itself. "Fine?" I laughed, and the laugh sounded like a broken bell. "My eye is burning. My sight is going." "Don't overdramatize. It's an infection, it's nothing," Linda Fernandes said as she shrugged in the doorway. "Stop making trouble." "He's the one who did it," I said, and pointed to Colby Martins, who...
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 should have been delivering New Year packages and leaving. Instead, I stood on the threshold of Ernesto Drake’s apartment with two heavy boxes and a heart that kept forgetting how to beat. "You're here?" he said behind me, like he had been waiting in the shadow of the doorway. He sounded calm. Too calm. "I—" I tried to be casual. "Delivery. For your mom." He glanced at the boxes, then at me. The hallway light made his cheekbones look like a quiet sculpture. "Come in." We had not...
I woke up to a thunder that I felt at the back of my skull. "Ow—" I rubbed my head and flinched as the room spun for a second. Papers fluttered everywhere. A tall man above the stairs barked like thunder too. "Do you hear me?" York Bennett was shouting, voice brittle as broken glass. "Dad is in surgery because of you! Three times they've sent us a critical notice. You keep acting like—what are you doing here?!" "I—" I squinted through the white sheets of paper hitting my cheek. The...
I woke into another body with the taste of metal and rain in my mouth and a stupid AR prompt blinking in my vision. The voice in my head chirped like a broken toy and spelled out my life like a game menu. "Welcome to Xianpath," the interface said. "Player identity: Kaitlyn Vega, junior sister of Grace Peak, sect: Lanchang. Choose your mode." I blinked and said out loud, "Why is my life now a dating sim?" "Choose," the game insisted, but the only active option lit for me already:...
I remember the heat first, then his voice. "He will come for her," Pascal murmured as smoke clawed at the rafters. "She will be afraid." "You mean Catherine?" I coughed, the word scraping out of me like dry leaves. "Yes." His answer was a stone. "She will be afraid." I laughed once, a thin dry sound that might have been a cough. "I won't be," I said. "I was already meant to die." The roof fell in on that promise. The temple collapsed, and his shoulder slid out of my reach like...
I was seven the first time I swore I would never get close to Christine Alvarez. "Calvin," my little king's voice in the courtyard, "this one is mine." "Whose?" I asked, though I already knew. She lay in a stroller, half a year old, large dark eyes like two coins fixed on me. "That girl," I said, and I reached out because what else did a seven-year-old king do when someone tiny looked at him like that? She peed in my arms. "Ugh!" I gagged, but I held her anyway, like a gentleman...
I never thought I'd be the kind of person to hoard perfume when the world was ending. Everyone else loaded carts with cans of beans and bottled water. I loaded a suitcase with glass bottles instead—sprays and mists, tester vials, fancy flacons. "For smell," I told myself. "For sanity." I was hoarding a memory: the idea that if the city smelled like anything but rot, maybe I could pretend nothing had happened. "You're not thinking straight, Kaitlyn," my neighbor Juana told me over the phone...
