Quick reads you can finish in 10-30 minutes
Found 1964 short novels
1 I am Eamon Branch. I graduated law school and took my first criminal case eight years ago. I thought I was going to learn how to argue in court. I did not expect to learn how people survive in a vacuum. "This won't be a dramatic gore case," I told myself when I first read the file. "It will be ordinary, and that is the strange part." It was August. The case was simple on paper: a worker named Marcel Martin was found hanged in dorm room 201 of a construction camp. The arresting scene...
I remember the summer the pact broke and the ambulance lights blurred like melted candy in the rain. "Miles, let me in," my friend January whispered into my palm as the nurse barreled the gurney through the doors. Her breath was a hard, animal sound. "You stay here," Miles Shimizu said, voice thick. "I will not leave you." I squeezed his hand and whispered, "Don't." The next room held the smell of antiseptic and something that sounded like a storm: the monitors, the surgeons' quiet...
I never imagined a stupid dare could change the whole shape of my life. "Hailey, you have to do it," Leighton said, eyes bright like she'd swallowed three sodas and a secret. She curled a strand of hair around a finger, doing that dramatic thing friends do when they want you to be their entertainment. "I am not confessing to Greyson Barrett," I said, which was true and also foolishly theatrical. "He's not that scary," Emilia said, smirking. "He's just tall, handsome, and runs half the...
I remember the heat first, the way the courtyard stones steamed under noon like a lid on a pot. I remember how the sky slid from bright to bruised in an hour, how thunder arrived like an order. I remember Kenji Amin whispering at my shoulder, too small-voiced to iron out the worry in his face. "Your Highness, maybe we should postpone—" Kenji said, ducking his head. "The weather—" "Kenji," I cut him off, amused. "You packed an umbrella yesterday. What else do you want from me?" He...
I died in a lake with the taste of salt and metal in my mouth, and the last thing I remember was Lincoln Carter saying, "You're disgusting, Collins — you don't love yourself." Then I floated above the water and watched my whole life play like a cruel movie. "I gave them everything," he had said, light as a feather. "Why would I waste a future on someone who doesn't value herself?" I watched him at the funeral acting like a gentle, broken boyfriend. I watched my grandmother, Adelaide Dunn,...
I remember the day my father told me we were rich like it was a strange joke he finally decided to own up to. "There's something I need to tell you," he said at lunch, his face blank as always. "Okay," I replied, pretending not to care. "What?" He pushed a stack of documents across the table with a single flat hand. "You're not poor, Aubree. We kept it from you." "You're joking." I laughed, then I didn't. The papers smelled of official ink and money. There were property...
"I am your sister." The slap landed like a bell. I felt the skin sting and then the cold of the room press in. "You are my sister?" Phoenix Silva's voice was low and hard. "You? You think you can call yourself my blood?" I kept my hands curled at my sides. A rain drum of thunder hit the windows. His breath smelled like cheap whiskey. "You drove me out of your house," I said. "You let them beat me. You let them call my mother names. You let me leave with nothing. I came back for one...
"I was not kidnapped," I said the way a child states facts. "I was sold." "You were sold?" the neighbor woman asked, her voice low but loaded like a stone dropped in a bowl. "By your own people?" "Yes." My voice was a tiny thread. "By my parents." "My name is Haley Erickson," I said after a moment, as if starting a book. "We had three children. Journee was the eldest, then Raul, then me." "Journee ran off," my mother once told the women in the yard, pretending to sniff. "She got...
December came like a verdict. "Ivy, your brother's plane—" the stranger's voice on the phone sounded like a thing I had never met before. It was hollow and polite and cruel. I ran. I ran because there was nowhere else to run. When I pushed open the front door, the house smelled like boiled cabbage and old grief. Dad sat at the dining table with his back to me, shoulders hunched like he had been carved that way. Mom’s hands were pressed into her face, the kind of face I had never seen...
I am telling the story in my own voice. I will not hide how small I felt, how angry I became, and how I let others believe they owned me until the moment I decided they would not. "It is colder than your bones," Tobias said the first night he saw me. "Then warm them," I snapped, but I was too weak for real anger to rise. He lifted my chin with those pale fingers that looked like bone and paint and said, "Smile. Try a smile." I thought: break that finger, make a new umbrella out of...
I remember the day my father told me about the three million like it was a currency for fate rather than for a bank account. "My company can't keep going," he said. "Marry him. Save us." "I will," I replied, and the words came out like a business plan. I didn't intend to fall in love. I intended to buy time—and to buy my father's redemption. "I am Valentina Estrada," I told myself the night I signed the papers. "You are a long loan, not a life sentence." Beau Roth arrived like a...
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 remember the sink, the cold hard rim pressing into my hair. The water filled the basin like a small lake, and the last thing I felt was my lungs clench shut. When I came back, someone was standing at the mirror, patting her hair dry and humming as if nothing had happened. "Big sister, I thought you were living so well. I'm disappointed," she said, and the voice in my mouth sounded like someone else's lullaby. "Who are you?" I croaked, but the answer was already moving, warm and...
I didn't realize my mic was still on until he answered me back. "You're still wearing clothes? Can't play?" I joked without thinking, watching the screen. The screen went quiet. Then a body moved out of frame and back in, like a stunt in a bad movie. "Now do you like it?" he asked, straight to camera. I froze. "My mic—" I tapped my phone like a madwoman. "Oh no, I didn't mute it!" "You're bold," someone in the chat teased. I typed like my fingers were burning. "I was joking....
"I don't want to die," I said, barely louder than the sound of water. Colton Blankenship's shadow filled the doorway long before his voice did. He stood there like a mountain, the hints of candlelight catching the hard planes of his face. His robe hung perfect; his jaw was a map of command. He did not move right away. Instead he listened to the water for a long, patient beat. "Why would you?" he asked finally. "Why say such things in a bathroom, Coraline?" "I—" I swallowed. The bath...
"I took the glass from his hand." I said it before I felt it. My fingers closed around cold glass, and all the noise in that private room slowed to the sound of my own breath. "Don't drink," I told him. "Not tonight." He didn't look at me. Sebastian Fontaine kept his smile with a woman folded into his arm like a prop. He looked at the woman and laughed, like I was air. "Julia," he said once, as if that was enough. "I am not your ghost," I answered. I put the glass on the...
I never expected a book to ruin my life and save it at the same time. "I can't believe he liked someone else," I blurted out to the empty page, though the book was already shut. My name is Eliana Lawrence. The boy everyone called my childhood friend—my small lion, my protector—was Jaxon Stevens. He had been my whole ordinary world: wandering hallways with sticky hands, arguing over who stole whose cookie, sharing the same umbrella, sharing secrets that sounded like treasure when he said...
I knocked until my knuckles hurt. The woman inside the door moved like she owned the night. The light through the peephole showed a braid, a silk robe, a hand on a towel. My own hand trembled and I told myself to breathe. “Who is it?” a voice called. “It’s me,” I said. “Open the door.” There was a long pause. Then the lock clicked and the door opened a hair. “Faith?” she said, and then she saw me. Her face changed fast, like a light being switched from warm to cold. The...
The cake sat on the coffee table, frosting sweating into soft rivers of white. I had bought it with my own hands the day before and carried it home in a box that smelled faintly of sugar and the plastic bag it came in. I had put it where Fisher would find it when he came back to celebrate our three-year anniversary. "He said he'd be five minutes," I muttered, staring at the crest of a soft strawberry, watching the cream droop. The clock hands moved like lazy fish. The cake sank. I watched...
I still remember the first thing I did wrong that night: I decided to be brave when I had only one brave drink in me. "I can't believe you did it," Tatiana said the morning after, her voice a mix of triumph and scandal. "You think it's funny?" I snapped, but I couldn't stop my hands from shaking. "I know your type. You always faint at ten meters from confession," she teased, but there was no real malice. Tatiana had been my best friend since we were eleven; she was also the one person in...
