Quick reads you can finish in 10-30 minutes
Found 1964 short novels
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 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 remember the night like a stone I had to step over. "I was just telling the delivery guy to watch his step," I said to no one at first, tasting the stale air in the elevator as if it could tell me whether I was alive. "You told him to watch his—what?" Noah Ferrari asked, slow and hard. "Are you flirting with delivery boys while you're on confinement? Do you have no shame?" "I said 'watch your step,'" I replied. "That's all." "You think everyone in this world looks at you?" Noah...
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...
"The slap landed." I tasted copper and then the world narrowed to red. "Shut up, you whore," my stepmother Dolores hissed. "You think you can ruin my girl's life and still breathe the same air?" I curled my hand over my cheek and hissed, but the room was a small prison. My father Karl stood by the door like a judge. My sister Kennedy laughed. My head felt hollow. "I didn't—" I tried. "You did," Kennedy said. "You gave him everything. How stupid can you be?" They pushed me out of...
I woke up with the taste of iron on my tongue and hands that belonged to a different life. "Monica," someone said, voice low and patient. "Are you awake?" I stared at the face over me—Avery Mahmoud's face—but when my hand flew to my throat to steady my breath, the fingers were mine. Not his. My heart kicked as if it had been hit with a mace. "Are you hurt?" the face asked again. "It hurts," I said, and the voice that came out was his. I looked down and saw the heavy cloak, the...
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 woke up tied to the cold floor." My voice is small in the dark. My hands are numb. My legs ache. A door opens. Footsteps click close. Someone says my name like they own it. "You must be Irene Xu," he says. I force my eyes open. I see a tall shape backlit by a single lamp. He sounds young, his voice low and dangerous. My head spins. "Who are you?" I snap. He kneels. "Kingston Wheeler," he says. "Officially, your husband." I laugh, a dry sound. "You are joking. Who forges a...
I hit the ground so hard the dry leaves stung my cheek like a slap. "Ugh—" I pushed myself up, wiping grit from my mouth, and the world smelled wrong: old sap, wet earth, and something like burned wood. "Beautiful, so beautiful—skin like milk, scent to raise the dead," coaxed a voice that should not exist. A tall thing moved between trunks, its face half-hidden by curling vines. Red eyes glowed from the knot of bark where a human face should be. It laughed in a way that made my bones feel...
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 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...
Midnight rain stitched the city into silver threads. I stepped out of the night and into the bar where the light smelled like perfume and regret. My phone buzzed. Stella had sent me a message. “Galilea, thank you again. Just a heads-up.” A photo attached. I looked at the photo. A woman with a loud smile sat on Nico’s lap, their eyes bright with an easy hunger. I texted back one word: “Why?” Stella answered with a laughing emoji and two words: “Entertainment value.” I didn’t wait for...
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...
I spat a string of bubbles and bit down on something hard and cold. "Ugh," I muttered, my tail flicking. "Who made food this miserable?" The crystal shard tasted like frozen stone, but it kept me alive. I was a fish—bright red, scales like embers—and there was a black mark on my left shoulder that looked like a half-winged butterfly. I had fallen from a circus swing, remember? One minute I was flying above the tents, the next I was sinking into a pond that felt like the inside of a...
I was born in the mountain, and for as long as I can remember my blood tasted dirty to me. "I told you," my grandmother would say, tapping the table with a nail, "that woman was trouble from the start. When she was with child she beat her own belly. Better to chain her than let her loose." "Chain her," my father would grunt, spitting tobacco into the dirt, and the world inside our valley held to that rule like iron. "Why is she chained?" I once asked, when I was small enough to still...
I smelled the night before it arrived — hot stone, old incense, a faint iron tang that made me straighten my spine even though I was already standing. "I'll take the bath," I told the servant who hovered by the window, and I said it like I was the sort of guest who could decide things. She curtsied. "Yes, Miss Ember. Everything will be ready." Her voice was small and honeyed, the sort that wants nothing and gives everything. Nobody noticed how I stilled. Nobody noticed that I had been...
"I hit him." I remember the lamp flying out of my hands and cracking across his skull. "He won't move," I whispered, my voice small in that white room, the lamp handle slick in my palm. "You killed him!" Greta's voice cut through like a blade. "No, I didn't," I said. "I didn't—" "She did it, Father. She killed him," Benedict shouted, and then he slapped me so hard my teeth hurt. They all moved like they had practiced this. Marcus Durham stood in the doorway with the calm face...
"I told you he would come back," Magdalena said into the phone like she was delivering weather. "And he did, didn't he?" "I know," I said. "He came back with a kid." Magdalena's laugh crackled through the line. "Are you okay?" "I am more than okay," I lied, and smiled because smiling kept the room steady. I kept my hand on the stack of papers on my desk—property contracts, investment memos, projections. They were real. They were mine. The man who once called himself my boyfriend...
They put my name on the giant banner and made the whole hotel smell like lilies and roasted meat. "I didn't ask for all this," I muttered, fingering the edge of the microphone. "Thank you, everyone." The applause washed over me like a warm current; the lights made my glasses glint. I tried to smile small. I tried to be the grateful, polite daughter everyone expected. "Indigo!" my mother called softly from the front row. "Say something about—" "Thank you," I said into the mic, and heard...
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...
