Quick reads you can finish in 10-30 minutes
Found 1964 short novels
I am pretending to be Isla Amin. I said those words to myself like a prayer and like a lie at once. "You are Isla now," I wrote on paper the first night under the bridal canopy. "You must not speak." Arden Fontaine pushed the bridal curtain aside with one steady hand. He looked like a portrait come alive—too handsome to be real, too calm to be harmless. I almost said it—"He's beautiful"—but the costume would have collapsed. I was the stand-in bride; I had to keep my mouth shut. Arden's...
1 The world had already decided how my story would end when I crawled out of the mass grave. "They married. Peace returned. The villain was stripped, humiliated, and buried." That was the last line I remembered from the battered book I’d read once in a fever, and that was where people said the story stopped. I did not expect to find him alive. "I can carry him," I said, my voice small to my own ears, but steady. The man between my arms was lighter than I expected, and heavier than my...
"I can't believe they're already whispering," I said, turning the ring on my finger until it made a faint clicking sound. "Let them whisper," Eldridge replied, as if his voice could smooth every crack. "They only see what they want to see." "Do they know what they want to see?" I demanded, half-laughing, half-annoyed. "Because their imagination is doing overtime." "You look tired," he said, and then he did something small that made my heart stutter — he reached and brushed a stray hair...
I killed myself. On New Year’s Eve, when families were together and the city glittered with fake warmth. I thought death would be silence and relief. Instead, I stood beside my own body and a thin man in white and paper asked my name. "What’s your name?" he asked, flipping a long book like a bored librarian. "Gillian Bird," I said. I wanted him to take me away, to file my name and let me be done. I wanted to sleep forever. He looked at the book. He frowned. "You have years left....
I learned to sew before I learned to answer for myself. "I will take a concubine," Jagger said the moment he crossed our threshold that spring. He spoke as if the season itself had instructed him. I kept stitching. The unborn child in my belly had been with me five months; my fingers fumbled but I kept at my needle because that was what I could do. Only two little sets of garments were good enough to be shown. "Madam," he said louder when I did not look up, "did you hear? I will take a...
I woke with my throat burning and my hands cramped on nothing. "Don't do it," the voice in my mouth kept saying, and I tasted copper. The hospital room smelled like bleach and fear. I blinked and saw the bag of my blood humming into a tube at my bedside. "You're awake," my mother said from beside me. Her voice sounded too bright. "Jaylah, honey—are you okay?" "I'm fine," I answered, though my body felt tipped and raw. The memory of the nightmare clung to me: a dark room, a perfect face...
I was born as the second prince in the northern court. I say it plainly: I grew up inside silk and shadow. My mother was a favored consort, and my childhood smelled of perfume and incense. People called her the light of the palace. "Do you remember how I used to say it?" she would joke. "Princes are like iron. Cold, steady. One day they'll be a blade." "I remember," I'd say, because those small betrayals of memory made her laugh. But when I was five, they killed her with a decree as...
I wake up with the taste of iron in my mouth and a memory like a broken film reel: a crash, a jail cell, a cheap leather bag thrown at my face, a delivery of a bright university letter that wasn't mine. I close my eyes and count heartbeats. The room around me is the same as it was the first time I woke into this life: sunlight crosshatching through thin curtains, a poster on the wall with a math formula someone once circled, the old wooden desk where I learned to copy answers and keep...
I moved out six months ago because Gordon Jackson slept with someone else. "Marina, are you really okay?" Josie asked the night I told her I was leaving. "I'm fine," I lied, and Josie said, "You sound like my grandmother when she eats lemon pie." I wasn't fine. I taped my heart back together and put it in a cardboard box labeled MOVE FORWARD. I found a tiny apartment in a new building, started a new job as a concept artist at a game studio, and worked insane hours. One late night,...
I found out the truth about my family by accident. It was the night my "father" collapsed. "Dad!" I shouted, but no one heard me in time. The ambulance came and left and later everyone said the right words, but the house went quiet the way a room does when a lamp is switched off. "Your sister will be here," my grandmother said, voice flat as paper. "She left years ago. She will handle the funeral." When the black-clad funeral parade passed our small house, a new figure slipped behind...
I crushed the cigarette under my shoe and watched the ash fall into the gutter. "I told you to wait in the car," I said without looking up. The driver grunted. "You sure about this, Cullen? He talks smooth." "I like smooth talkers," I said. "They tell you more than they mean." I am Cullen Price. I run a small detective office. I find lost dogs, catch cheating lovers, and sometimes find things people want buried. Hazel Clement—an old woman with a dry throat and steady hands—came to...
I never expected seven photos to turn my life upside down. "Did you see the confession wall?" Kiley asked when I walked into the dorm. She was fanning herself with a textbook, dramatic as always. "I saw," I said, trying to sound bored. "Someone keeps posting pictures of me." "Someone?" Mariah squealed from the bunk above. "Which someone? Show us." I pulled my phone out and scrolled. One, two, three—seven photos, each different, each of me with a lollipop in my mouth. "Why would...
I pushed the villa door and the warm light hit my wet coat. “You’re home late,” Matias said without looking up. I froze. The coat in his hand was not mine. There was a woman on the sofa, hair half loose, mascara streaked down her cheeks like fake grief. She laughed when she saw me, sweet and practiced. “Matias, I was just leaving,” she cooed. “I didn’t want to wake you.” “Leave, now,” Matias said. His voice was flat, sharp as glass. Heat rose in my throat. I had come home to...
"I slammed the door so hard the glass shook." "I told you to stop," Roman said. "I told you nothing," I said. "I told them everything." Roman Bentley did not argue. He folded his hands like he always did when I was about to do something reckless. He had that patient face that made me trust him since we were children in the same neighborhood. "I won't let them bury this," he said. "Say it again. Who did it?" "It was Corinna," I said. "And Delilah helped her." Roman's jaw...
I picked up the phone because my thumb trembled over the screen. I was about to say hello when a woman's voice came through, low and teasing. "Light. Be gentle, do you hear me?" "Yes…" another voice whispered. My head went blank. "What's happening?" I asked myself out loud. A sound that did not belong to a classroom, a library, or a study session crawled into my ears. It didn't take experience to recognize it. I froze. Tears started on their own. "Who is that?" I...
I woke up wrapped in purple silk, and the first thing I noticed was the sound of horses outside and the smell of wood smoke. My name is Haylee Petrov. A minute before, I was in my bedroom apartment, watching a fashion gala on TV. Now I blinked at a wooden beam, at lacquered furniture, at a paper lantern throwing soft light across a face I didn't know. "Who are you?" I whispered. "Haylee," I answered myself aloud, because the mouth moved and the word tasted like my real name. It felt like...
"I don't want to be your brother anymore." He had a cigarette between two fingers and a lazy, moonlit face. He leaned me against the cold wall and brushed his fingers along a freckle at the corner of my eye. "Be my girlfriend." "You don't get to say no." I remember the first time I said the word 'brother' to him. Not because I wanted to lie. Because it was the one safe shell I could put myself into. Because in a neighborhood where faces turn away, calling someone family is an...
I remember the subway falling into a kind of hush that felt like a held breath. I remember my phone’s green glow painting strangers’ faces in sickly light. I remember a small green dot slipping from the screen, through my forehead, and into my head. “System: detected host. Soul binding initiated,” a flat voice said inside my skull. “Who are you?” I asked out loud, though no one in the dark train answered. “I am Trial Deity Support System 001. Hello, Master Jaylene Meyer,” it...
I woke up to darkness and a weight across my hips, and for a second I thought the floor had turned into sea. Then my hand found skin and the world made a different kind of sense: warm, slow, breathing. "Who is—" I started, and my voice came out thin. A hotel lamp clicked on somewhere; a strip of weak light painted the man beneath me. He looked like a photograph come to life: black eyebrows, a nose that would photograph well from any angle, lips that might have been carved for a movie...
"I did not push you." The voice was thin, tired. I heard Kayleigh laugh as if she had already won. "You were always clumsy, Ari," she said. "You thought the prince would save you. What a joke." I stumbled back toward the cliff edge. My palms slid on damp stone. My chest knocked against the wind. Behind Kayleigh, guards waited like statues. In front of her, Prince Gavin Dean moved with a calm that ate the air. "Kayleigh—" Gavin's voice softened. "Are you all right?" Kayleigh fell...
