Quick reads you can finish in 10-30 minutes
Found 1964 short novels
I woke up to a chorus of petty, greedy voices calling my name like I was some village relic. "Janessa, take that jeweled collar for a week—I'll return it." "Janessa, that embroidered gown belongs in my chest. I'll wear it tonight!" "Janessa, that little inkstone—I'll gift it to the girl at the school, just lend it to me." "Janessa, leave the gemstone bracelet. You'll make the ancestor proud." My head banged against the carved bedhead. I tasted ash in my throat. When I forced my lids...
I grew up with a bow in my hands and bruises under my skin. When I say "I," I mean Kiley Charles—though no one back then bothered to call me kindly. My parents said I was wrong because I practiced blade and bow instead of ink and brush. My father, Amos, and my mother, Laura, kept their goodness for the world and their cruelty for me. The first time I saw Emersyn, she ran up barefoot, a laugh like a bell. Two boys followed her, but she walked as if the sun belonged to her. "Wow, you shoot...
I never thought a white shirt could start a small rebellion. "You look ridiculous," I said, standing in Hudson's doorway while he blinked at me like I had landed from another planet. "Friend," he said, and the single word sounded careful, as if he was testing the air. "Friend?" I laughed. "We haven't used 'friend' since high school." He shifted his weight. "We—yeah. Friend." "Then why are you standing in your own living room like a man at a shrine?" I stuck my head further inside...
I got two envelopes on my twenty-fourth birthday. One had glittery paper and a neat embossed name. The other smelled of disinfectant when I opened it in the bathroom and found the two words that made everything tilt. "They sent me his wedding invitation," I told the sink like it could help, and then, softer, "and my diagnosis." "You're joking," the voice on the phone said. "It's not a joke," I said. "One says 'congratulations' for a life that's beginning. The other says 'we're sorry'...
I remember the phone ringing like a small bell in a flooded room. "Pick it up," someone behind me hissed, and hands closed on my shirt as if I were already their property. "Don't make it complicated," a voice said, casual and small-talky. "Just teach her a lesson." "Yeah," another voice laughed. "Don't let it get messy." I pressed my palms to my mouth because a laugh bubbled up and tasted like bile. They tugged, pushed, struck. The stars behind my eyelids were not beautiful; they...
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...
1 "I didn't think an app could change my entire life," I said aloud to the empty room, more to prove I was still myself than because I expected an answer. "Apps do strange things," Everest Olivier replied from the chair opposite me, voice low and almost amused. He was exactly as my old drawings had always painted him—delicate, tired, impossibly pale. He leaned forward. "Did you get the peaches?" "I did." I touched the cardboard box like it might be another dream. "A box of white peaches,...
“Get in,” he said. I slid into the passenger seat before I knew why. The car smelled like cold leather and lemon. Rain tapped the glass. My heart still thudded from the exam I’d just finished and the stupid little lie I’d told to help a friend that morning. “You okay?” he asked after a long beat. “Fine.” I wrapped my hands around my bag. “Thank you for the lift.” He looked at me for a second, then back at the road. Wesley Daley had that way of making everything feel a degree...
"I can't find him," I shouted into the hot blue of the desert. "Ivan? Dolan?" I tried every name I could think of and ended up shouting the one that mattered most. "Dolan! Where are you?" The sun made the air seem like a curtain of glass. My throat felt on fire. My smart suit had melted down to useless threads. I tasted metal and dust. The desert answered with nothing but waves of heat. "I won't panic," I told myself. "Not now. Not while the babies are inside me." "Ivory?" said no...
Half a year ago I found out my husband was cheating. "I bought this for him." My voice trembled as I handed our son the small wrapped box that looked like a toy camera. "Happy birthday." He—Donovan Black—smiled like a man who'd practiced tenderness in a mirror. He was good at the gestures that make people believe. He said, "One more year, be a man with responsibility." Our son ripped paper with the wide, trusting eyes of a child. Donovan knelt and showed him how to set up the GoPro,...
"I stole his phone and found a call labeled 'Raquel.'" I remember how my hands shook when I saw the name flash on Apollo's screen. I remember the rush of anger and something colder under it: the feeling that I was finally done pretending. "Who is Raquel?" I asked Apollo that night, holding his phone like evidence. He didn't look at me. He looked at the living room floor and answered, "A long story." Then he walked away. He had been walking away from me for four years. "You think...
"I can't believe the fortune-teller meant this," I said, wrapping the thin hotel blanket around my shoulders. "You said it was either big disaster or big luck," Elias replied from the bedside, cigarette smoke curling between us like a small gray ribbon. "I didn't think 'sleeping with my boss' typed into big luck," I answered. "I thought maybe a lottery or an inheritance." He inhaled slowly and didn't smile. He never smiled like other people. He took another drag and the ash trembled....
I moved into a new apartment full of cardboard and stubborn optimism, and then discovered, to my complete and undeniable horror, that my ex lived one flight below. "Do you have a cramp in your toe?" a low voice asked behind me as I fumbled with a box. I froze with my thumb held up like an idiot. "I—no. It's itchy. That's it." "Uh-huh," he said. "Uh-huh?" I should have walked away. I didn't. I told myself I wouldn't look. I did. He filled the hall like the kind of man who was...
I woke up to shouting, to the dry sting of sunlight and the smell of wet straw and old sweat. I blinked and the world spun—then steadied into a shabby roof, rickety beams, and the sound of someone crying like their heart had been ripped out. "Not—don't take my sister! Don't! Please—" a child's voice cut through the noise. "Shut up, you little pest, get away from my legs!" an old woman barked, spitting duty and greed in equal measures. I tried to breathe and my lungs felt wrong. My...
I was leaning over a steaming bowl of noodles when I heard the question that made my heart stumble. "Do you want the cilantro?" a voice asked. "I'll take it out for Drew," I said without looking up, lifting a small pair of chopsticks. "He takes after his dad—hates cilantro." "Your son hates cilantro?" the man across the table asked flatly. I froze with a pile of green between the chopsticks and my hand. The man across the room wasn't just any man. He was Grayson Estrada. I...
I am Gwen Huang. I was sixteen the day they raised the small sedan into the courtyard and set me inside Eamon Vogel’s house. “I asked Aunt Emmalynn,” I told myself, folding my hands until my knuckles ached. “I asked and she said—” “Aunt Emmalynn,” I had asked once, clutching her sleeve the night before the wedding, “what is the real difference between a eunuch and an ordinary man?” She had stumbled, her fingers twisting a rosary of beads. “It’s that… that they cannot have children,”...
I never planned to become a planner of ruin. I planned for a quiet life. I planned for city office hours, for the children's laughter, for New Year dinners that smelled like soy and ginger. Then everything changed on a snowy New Year's Eve. "Come, sit," my aunt said, patting the wooden chair beside her. Her voice was soft when guests were near, sharp when the room emptied. "Sit where?" I asked. "You and June must understand," she said, looking around to make sure no one watched....
"The cup hit my arm." I jerked awake, my arm burning, and the memory hit me harder than the pain. "The cup hit me," my father had said, and then the hall went silent. "You know your crimes?" his voice had filled the great hall like thunder. "I did what was right," I said then. "He stole the white elder's pill. He deserved it." "You beat him until he could never walk again." He spat the words. "You broke laws, child." "I did not break the law," I said. "I broke a thief." They had...
I remember the first time I saw Elias Blanc close up. "You don't look tired," he said the day he picked me out of my dull office like a new toy. "I am fine," I answered, though my eyes were hollow from nights in hospital wards. My sister's name is Aviana Brady. She was thin as paper then, and the bills kept coming like rain. Elias smiled without feeling. "Good. Be ready tomorrow. Come to the garage." That was how I became his driver. That was how I began to watch a man wear cruelty...
I never thought I'd wake up on an operating table to the face of my ex. "Your tattoo—what on earth did you do?" Grey Brandt asked, and his voice was flat as if he were reading a chart. "My portrait," I said through a twist of pain. "Cute, right?" The anesthesiologist beside him snorted, then laughed out loud. Grey's long fingers hovered near my lower belly. He pressed, then drew a gentle line on my skin with a gloved fingertip. "On this spot? Can your current boyfriend handle...
