Quick reads you can finish in 10-30 minutes
Found 1964 short novels
"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...
I remember the smell first: damp straw, dust, and the sourness of old anger. Then the sound—my mother's voice breaking in the dark, bargaining with herself and with everyone else. "Please, Mother," Fiona Bray sobbed. "Don't let them take my girls." "Take them where?" Corinne Bonner said from where she stood under the rafters, flat as a blade. "To a better life. To a life that suits them." "Better life?" I spat, though no sound came out. I was Lailah. I had pretended to be dead already...
I woke up in the third year of our marriage knowing something had changed. The room smelled like the cheap lavender soap I used and the faint cologne Ezio always left on his shirt collar. I lay there and watched the ceiling until the text came—Marcella's name lighting my screen like a tiny accusation. "What are you doing?" his message read, and I did the stupid, hopeful thing: "Thinking of you." Silence, then: "Home?" I looked at the ceiling fan and typed: "Yes. Dinner or eggs? Fried...
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...
I wake to the smell of disinfectant and a small warm head against my ribs. “Don’t move,” a low voice says. “Stay still.” I keep my eyes shut. The voice is calm, colder than the winter light through the curtains, but it is steady. A child’s breath, small and wet, ghosts my cheek. “Mallory,” the voice says softer now. “You’re awake.” I let the name sit. It is new and it fits. I taste metal and pain and the old thinking that breaks like thin ice underfoot. “Where am I?” I manage, my...
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 snow because of how it made everything honest. It did not hide footprints; it showed every stamp, every pleading forehead pressed flat into white. When I was small I watched a boy kneel for three days in snow that cut through his sleeves. "He will not stand," I thought then. The boy later became the man who took our house, and my life, and whose name I could not look at without tasting cold. "Lauren." My brother called me that like a bell. "Come. Eat." "Later." I said. I...
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 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...
"System loaded," the voice said, metallic and calm. "I don't wish to be a footnote," I whispered back to an empty, damp room that smelled of mildew and old metal. "I don't want him to win." A small, folded light unfurled into a creature that looked like a tiny fan-winged serpent. It landed on my shoulder and tapped my collarbone with something like affection. "My name is Belen Corey," it chirped in a tone too bright for the place, "and I'm—your interface." I blinked. "Belen? You...
I woke to the elevator bell and a clean, ordinary morning. For a heartbeat I could not remember which life this was. "Abby, are you okay?" Jacqueline Schmitz asked from the corridor. "I'm fine," I lied. My hands shook when I slipped the phone open. "Zack, it's three hours to noon, right? Six hours until—" "Until what?" he asked, distance in his voice. "The day everything changes," I said, and I did not tell him the real reason. I did not tell anyone yet. I did not want the heavy...
I sneezed and woke up cold. I blinked and realized two things at once: the silk against my skin was wrong, and my hair was dripping. I sat up and water ran down my neck and into my lap. "Ah—" I started, then touched my cheek. Someone hit me. A woman in green sat in a high chair and looked at me with a slow, measuring stare. She wore enough jade and pearls to make my modern, red-carpet wardrobe jealous. Her smile had no warmth. "Who is this insolent girl?" she said. "Autumn, teach...
"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 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 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 remember the smell of lilies that day—the cold white stems bowed on the granite, the cemetery wind that seemed to whisper old accusations. I remember Adrian Kelly’s face, sharp and thunder-still, and the divorce papers slamming onto my hands like a verdict. “Cecelia Adams,” he said, and there was no warmth in it. “Sign.” “I didn’t—” My voice cracked; I hated how small I sounded. “You are done here.” He flung the papers. “From today you will pay a thousand times what you cost...
They called it a funeral. I called it a marketplace. "Isn't it strange?" one woman whispered, fanning herself with a program. "She looks almost... relieved." "Relieved?" another scoffed. "Relieved that she's rich now? He left everything to her." I kept my face neutral. I kept my hands folded on the black silk in my lap. Black had been the safest choice: invisible on top of all their stares. "I am Kayleigh Hall," I said later, when everyone else had finished their small, sharpened...
1 "I sent them," Journee said, voice flat as paper, "and then I thought: maybe after you see, you'll finally stop pretending." I looked at the screen in her hand. Ten photos, some video stills, all of them impossible to unsee. Arden Henry—my Arden—shirtless on a yacht, laughing with a woman I knew, sitting against him like she had every right. Eliza Wood. My hands tightened on the phone until the screen blurred. "Are you sure?" I asked. "These are… real." "Totally real," Journee...
The river smell of metal and algae was the last thing I remembered before everything went dark. I opened my eyes to an unfamiliar ceiling, a lamp that hummed, and a couch that smelled faintly of perfume and canned soup. I sat up, fingers finding the edge of a low coffee table. "Where am I?" I asked the air. "You are in Month Six of the After," said a voice that was not there or was everywhere. "Please survive for thirty days. Target this round: collect one hundred crystals for...
I first learned the feel of my own ribs the way others learn to read—by touch, by habit, by repetition until the shock dulls. "Show me," Findlay said in the dream again, and I laughed because the words had become a ritual between us: a way for him to prove I wouldn't betray him, and for me to prove that there was nothing left I wouldn't give. I do not look like people imagine. I do not look like those pretty heroines for whom lanterns are hung and songs are written. When I was...
