Quick reads you can finish in 10-30 minutes
Found 1964 short novels
I wake up gasping and someone is yelling in my head: "Punch him!" "Yes! Hit him!" I shout into the darkness of my bedroom and then sit bolt upright. "Imogen?" Larissa's voice comes from the bunk below. "It's fine," I whisper, cheeks wet without me remembering crying. "You're screaming again," she says, worried. A week of the same dream had already hollowed me out: in sleep I watched my ex get his face rearranged, and every time the fists belonged to someone else—someone...
I took the job because I needed the money. Plain and ugly reason, said like a cashier handing change. "I'll be paid to sleep," I told my mother, and she laughed like I had told a joke worth a million. "You're joking," Legacy said, wiping the gardening dirt from her hands. "Who pays someone to sleep?" "A very rich boy who can't sleep without being held," I said, and the two words felt like the title of a bad novel. "He'll pay twenty thousand for one night." Edric Barnes said that to...
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 did not expect to wake up in a palace. I definitely did not expect my ex to be sitting on the dragon throne. "Dashiell," I said the name like a dare the first time I saw him wearing the gold embroideries, "you look ridiculous." He blinked, and the whole hall seemed to halt. He sat straighter on the throne, and his voice was the same dry, low thing I remembered from late-night talks and bad takeout: "Hadley Andersson, are you sleepwalking?" "I'm awake," I said, because what else do...
"I refuse to starve," I said, folding the ugly divorce paper until it cracked. I shoved the paper into the dirt, spit once, and laughed like a fool. Someone had left me in the ruined shrine at the edge of the village and called it an end. My uncle's wife hit me. My so-called husband signed his name and walked away. They all thought they were done with me. "Done with you?" I asked the empty room. "Nope. Not today." A thin man with bad habits—Pablo Ahmad, everyone called him "the lazy...
I died under gray snow and rotten teeth, and then I sat up in a bed that smelled of perfume and starch and sleep, and I decided I would not die for anyone's plot again. "Don't leave me, don't leave me," a voice had screamed when I was still flesh and torn, and men with clean collars had smiled down at me and walked away. I remember the smell of blood on my own ankles, the water-slick of the blade that had cut me open. I remember a man—tall, a government of charm—carrying another woman like a...
"I slammed the taxi door and my phone buzzed with 'Rex Branch' on the screen." I looked up at the orange sky and felt like smiling, then the name stole it. I answered on the second ring. "Emi, you're back?" Rex's voice was flat, sharp. It never softened. "Yep," I said. "Just landed." "Come to the office," he ordered. "Now." "Okay," I said, and the smile that had started to come back died. I put my head down and cursed like a private choir against one man: Rex Branch, my market...
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 opened the wrong door." "Well, you did open it." Angelo grinned, leaning against a row of lockers like it was his throne. I wanted to crawl into the floor and disappear. Instead I froze and let my eyes do the impossible: count abs. "Hey," Mateo said, cheeks flushing, fingers on his shirt's hem like a nervous kid. "You okay?" "I'm—" I couldn't say "sorry" because it sounded like I'd asked for this, and I hadn't. So I said, "I forgot to lock the door." "And you walked into the...
I woke up under a white ceiling and for a long, dizzy second I only remembered the softness of fur and the smell of flax in the sunlight. I blinked like a cat and then realized my hands were hands — thin, warm, and human. "Isabel?" a voice echoed in my head and it felt like a memory someone else had given me. I pushed my hair off my face, sat up, and said, "I'm Isabel." "Isabel Cardoso?" the voice said again, softer, like a name it had worn carefully for years. I smiled without...
I was debugging the app when the school nurse called. "Amelia, your godson got into a scuffle. Can you pick him up?" the voice said. I blinked at the monitor full of red error lines and pushed my chair back. "I'm on my way." By the time I reached the kindergarten, my head buzzed from staring at code all day. Dustin Ferguson sat on my lap, forehead bright with sweat, a small plaster on his brow. He hugged me like a cat that wanted to be petted and hated to be put down. "Mommy," he...
"I can't breathe!" I tore my face out of cold water and gagged. Air hit my lungs like a knife. I gasped and clawed to shore. "Miss! Miss, are you alive?" A maid's voice was sharp and small. Someone wrapped a cloak around me. Hands were warm. I coughed until my head cleared. I sat up and looked around. Stone paths. A low pond. Wooden houses with tiled roofs. No cars. No neon. The world smelled of wood smoke and river mud. "Where am I?" I whispered, but the maid only cried. "Miss...
I woke up in the dark and did not want anyone to know that my eyes saw again. "I can't see a thing," I told them for the hundredth time, and my voice was steady as a spoon. "You always say that," Forrest Tran, my little brother, laughed cruelly from across the table. "Maybe your eyes are lazy." "I am not lazy," I said. "I am unlucky." For years I lived on the edge of being noticed and then being pushed away. I was a low-born daughter in a house that had plans for other hands to line...
I never imagined the night would feel so thin—like a page barely holding its ink. When he said, "It's getting late. Let's sleep," the voice dragged me back from the edge of panic. "Sleep?" I whispered, fingers nervously twisting the hem of my wedding dress. My name is Ginevra Santiago. I was a substitute bride—traded like a piece in a ledger to secure money that could keep my mother alive. I had never been in a room like that before, never faced a man who looked like he had swallowed the...
"I took the picture." I was holding the camera like a weapon when the hotel door cracked open. "You promised to marry Alexis, Miles," a sneering voice said. "Why are you still seeing me, Claudia? Alexis won't know." "Heh," came another voice, rough and drunk. "I'm marrying her for the project money. When it's done, I'll throw her away." Click. Click. Click. "I told you to stop!" they both cursed as I snapped more shots. "I signed the wedding off," I said aloud to myself....
"I don't want you to say anything else. Sign here." I pushed the pen down and the paper slid under my fingers like a trapdoor. "Leanna," Vaughn said, very quietly, "I offered you houses, a downtown duplex, and ten million. Is there anything more you want?" "You offered me things," I said. "You offered me my life as a purchase order." He didn't look ashamed. He looked like a man reading a catalog. "You slept with him, didn't you?" Vaughn asked, then laughed the laugh people laugh...
"I thought you were coming home to marry me." "Kaylin," he said, like that explained anything. "You're a good woman, but we're not right for each other." Those words felt like ice poured straight into my chest. I learned to answer with numbers. "You'll pay me for leaving," I said, voice steady. "Count everything. The clothes, the food, the favors. I kept receipts." Carsen Collins blinked. "What?" "My ledgers," I said, and set the fat book on the table. "Four thousand liang, give...
I was going home from another blind date gone wrong, pushing my scooter the last hill into the village, when the little disaster of the night — the scooter — finally gave up. "Great," I spat at the cracked headlight. "Just great." "Are you okay?" asked a voice out of the dark. I turned. A small creature with golden fur sat on the roadside, hands folded like a bow. It looked ridiculous and solemn and a little heroic at once. "Old-timer, what—" I started, then it cleared its...
I was taking a shower when TaoTao started clawing at the bathroom glass. "Shh—TaoTao, stop it," I said through the steam, wrapping my towel tighter. The scratching grew louder. The kind that makes your skin prickle. When I opened the door, there he was—sitting on the rug like a king, TaoTao on his lap, both of them squinting at me. "You're home early," I said. My voice came out flat and three octaves higher than usual. He didn't answer right away. Farrell Mustafa blinked at me like...
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,...
