Quick reads you can finish in 10-30 minutes
Found 1964 short novels
I am Lucia Petrov. "I wasn't always Lucia," I started telling people once, and they would look at me like it was a neat little origin to file away. "My mother wanted me to be Lucia," she used to say with a half-smile, "because she liked the sound of it. My father thought 'Lucy' was better. He changed it, like he changed everything he could." "Why would he care so much about a name?" my friend Ernesto Hawkins asked once. He was always blunt. "Because he liked orders," I answered. "He...
The breakup happened just now. I saw them through the slightly ajar door: Brady Zimmermann and Iliana Persson, lost in a kiss that was the same mouth that had kissed me ten minutes before. I stood at the threshold and watched until my phone rang. The sound cut through the hush and startled them. Brady looked up. His eyes were still soft, like he had been born to look that way; Iliana turned toward me with a smile that was almost a dare. "Kaylie," Iliana said lightly, like we were at a...
I found the photo by accident. "Why are you scrolling my phone?" Boston asked as I handed it back, but my hands were shaking and I already knew the answer before his mouth formed the question. "It was unlocked," I said. "I grabbed it to check the train times." "You always do that," he laughed, the way he always laughed at small things. He was so soft with me. "You're ridiculous." "Show me," I said. He frowned and handed the phone. I opened his messages, my eyes catching a...
I remember the cold first. Snow came down like white paper, slow and stubborn. I remember the white of my fur, the thinness of his sleeves, and the way the world seemed to tune itself to one small foot. "It is enough," I said. He looked up at me from the snow. His face was thinner than I had expected. His knuckles were frozen and cracked. He kept his back straight as if wood still held him up, and his eyes were knives wrapped in ice. "Miss Florence," he said, and his voice was raw....
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 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 wake up in a candlelit room that should not be mine and know at once that I have been moved — not in body only, but into a life already waiting like a trap. The silk walls smell of herb and ash. A man laughs somewhere beyond the curtain. I am supposed to be YuanYuan, the bedchamber maid of Colton Acosta, Ninth Prince. I am Karina Abe now. I know what happens to YuanYuan. "Who are you?" I ask the man across the thin veil. "You?" His voice runs like silk. "You're the chamber...
I remember the rain that night like a cold fingernail tracing my spine. "Be quiet around Yue. Don't make her angry," Daniel said, his voice low and steady, like the cello he sometimes pretended not to hear but always felt. "I know," I said, and I fastened the last button of his shirt. My hands trembled, but I smiled. "I remember." "Good girl," he said, and he pinched my cheek like I was something soft he could keep. He put on his coat and left without staying the night, like he never...
I woke up sweating before dawn, the phone screen burning my thumb with its numbers: 39°C. "Again?" I mumbled, and the house answered with the loud, lazy bickering of a summer morning. "Mom, did you see the weather?" I said to the air and to Marcella Mills—my mother—who was already at the table shelling eggs without looking up. "Everything's too hot," she answered, as if we had been rehearsing the line for a week. "Go dress the baby. The sun's already angry." I pushed aside the thin...
"I won't get up yet," I croaked without opening my eyes. "Get up, Gwen! It's past dawn. Your breakfast is on the stove, but it's getting cold," my mother shouted through the thin door. "Fine. I'm up," I said, dragging the words like a blanket. Jana Hussein kept at it. "You lazy thing, always avoiding work. Eat and don't stay in bed all day." I stayed in bed a little longer and listened to the village wake. Birds, the distant clank of tools, people's voices going to the fields. I had...
I am Leanna Corbett. People know me by the way I write love that hurts and heals; they know me by the pale photos and the quiet interviews. I am the kind of writer whose life reads like a set piece—always measured, always collected. I have made a career of being a vessel: I take other people's pain, braid it into sentences, and sell the ache back to readers. That was my art and my armor. "People call you cold," Quinn Patterson said once at a café, stirring his coffee like it was a medical...
I smelled rot and iron and the small, ridiculous sweetness of a cake at the same time. "Who is she?" I asked, even though I already knew the answer before the car door shut. "Forrest's concern," came the cold voice. "He has no right," I said. "I'm his affianced." "Forrest doesn't owe explanations." The voice was short; Forrest King didn't say more. She looked at me then—Luz Powell—tilted her head, smiled like a girl who had never been to a war, and the whole base went quiet as if...
"Get in the car," my father said. I walked slow and looked at him. He smelled like cologne and money. The city lights burned above us. I kept my hands folded in my lap so they would not tremble. "Are you sure you want this?" Pavel asked quietly from the front seat. "I have to," I said. "I am ready." Sterling opened the car door for me like a gentleman in a movie. Andres pretended not to smile, but his hand landed on my shoulder. "Don't worry," Andres said. "If anyone bothers you,...
"I shouted, 'Stop the blade!'" I didn't know why my voice came out so loud. I didn't know why my hands were wet with someone else's blood. The stage light burned hot. The heads rolled on cue. People cheered and then some of them screamed. I was kneeling on a cold stone floor in an old scene, and then I opened my eyes in a narrow bed, the room smelling of instant noodles and cheap detergent. "Who are you?" the woman in the doorway asked. "Who am I?" I said. My throat felt wrong. My...
I still remember the rain that day, how it tapped on the subway roof like a small, steady accusation. "Do you want to do something for 520?" I typed, my thumbs clumsy with hope. After nine years, three of them as his girlfriend, I was still the one who asked first. Mateo Kennedy took forever to answer. "What holiday?" he finally replied. I pictured him—brow faintly furrowed, voice always the kind that rolled out like cool water. "It's five two zero. It sounds like 'I love you'—can...
I remember the first time I thought money would fix everything. "Put the kettle on," I told her, like I always did. "I'll be back late." Genevieve tied the towel around her thin waist and smiled, the way she always smiled when she thought I was pleased. Her hands trembled a little when she lifted the lid. "Don't stay out too late," she said softly. "Business," I replied, because that was the shorthand for the nights I wasn't with her any more. She nodded, obedient as a child, as if...
I woke to a sky that did not belong to me. "Abigail?" someone said. "Is that—" I opened my eyes to silk, to light, to a hall dressed for a wedding. Red banners streamed like rivers, and every face in the room was turned toward a pair on a dais. The man at the center wore the cold, familiar armor of Aarón Muller, but he wore joy—he wore it in a way I had never seen him wear anything. Beside him stood a woman with my eyes. "Slow," a voice called. "Hold it—" The master of ceremony...
"You missed so much," Drake said, shoving my name into his phone like it was a prize. I looked up from the lab gate and smiled without meaning to. "What did I miss?" "You'll see," Drake replied. "Heard a whole class went quiet. The new substitute? Wow." "Substitute who?" I asked, and felt them all watching me like a minor scandal. Drake laughed. "You're the guest star, Jovie." I didn't answer. I kept my stride and pushed open the lecture hall door. The room smelled of chalk and...
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...
I have never been the sort of man who trusted ghosts or prayers. "I don't trust any of it," I told him, voice level enough that the study's paper lanterns did not flicker. Simon Church folded his robe with the practiced calm of someone who has talked a man down from a cliff too many times. "And yet you came," he said. "I came," I agreed, "because I wanted to know if the impossible could be asked for one final time." "You want resurrection," Simon said plainly. "You want your... wife...
