Quick reads you can finish in 10-30 minutes
Found 1964 short novels
I woke up to rain and the taste of iron, and for a wild second I thought I was still falling. "Who left her here?" a voice barked in the dark. "Move her. It's pouring." "I said move her!" another man spat, and boots thudded on wet soil. I lay on my back and blinked. The sky was a slit of gray; wind threw rain like a curtain. My head hurt like it had been hit with a thick book. When my eyelids finally obeyed, I saw a flash of red—my red wedding robe—and two men looming over me. They...
I did not expect to wake up and find the world very nearly the same, and yet everything wrong in a way only I could feel. "We thought you were gone," Stefan said the first time he saw me. He had the same gravel in his voice as always, like a road that had been walked on too often. "We thought you were done for, Ethan." "I thought so too," I said. I let myself be called Ethan because names are brittle things and I liked the sound of this one when it slipped from Stefan's mouth. "I tried...
I already knew Phoenix Archer had cheated on me. "I saw his comment," I said into my palm while I sat on the couch, the phone screen burning the pattern of the photo into my eyes. "Who?" Helena asked, peeking over the cup of tea she made for me. "Amelia Pfeiffer," I said. "She commented on his post about me peeling crayfish." Helena clicked her tongue. "What did she say?" "She wrote, 'Clip your nails, I can see the dirt.'" "Gross," Helena said. "I made him delete her," I...
I opened my eyes to bright sky and the sting of pain at the back of my head. "Don't move," a voice hissed somewhere close. My vision swam. I saw a shirtless man fumbling with a button near my chest. Panic filled me like icy water. "What are you doing?" I said, or it came out a ragged sound that might once have been a question. "Making you mine," he said with a grin that tasted like rot. I fought. My hands were clumsy, breath harsh. I kicked at him and hit something that made him...
I woke up at three in the morning to the buzz of a message. "Don't look at the moon tonight." I stared at my phone until my eyes watered because the sender's name made my heart clench. Lucas Mori. "Are you drunk?" I typed back, fingers trembling with a weird half-anger, half-curiosity. "It's been three years. Why are you texting me at three a.m.?" No reply. I rolled over and told myself to go back to sleep. I couldn't. The message sat in my head like a pebble in a shoe. I...
"I watched him kiss her in the middle of my birthday party." That sentence sits in my memory like a bruise. I was twenty then, wearing what I thought was a brave smile. The room was full of people I knew by name and some I did not, but Vaughn Black stood out the way a storm does. He had taken my teenage years — the years I trailed after him — and folded them into a neat, unremarkable paper plane. He launched that plane in front of everyone the night his latest conquest...
1 I had been awake at the lab for four nights straight, eyes glued to numbers until the spreadsheets blurred. I remember my mentor tapping my shoulder and saying, "Go rest. I'll watch the data." "I can do it," I said. "Just another hour." When I shut my eyes, the whir of machines turned into wind. When I opened them, the fluorescent lab was gone. A carved wooden screen and paper lanterns took its place. I sat on a futon in a room that smelled of incense, not coolant. My hands were tied...
I waited ten years because he once said he would marry me. "You said you'll marry me," I told him that night in the hall full of candles and woven banners, offering the plum wine we had buried together when we first left home. Alonso Garcia smiled, polite and distant, and raised his cup. "Try it, Brianna. It is Mei Blossom wine from the south. Penn brought it back." "I remember," I said. "You buried it with me when we left." I poured a small taste into his cup and watched him lift...
"I'll give you three silver for him." I shoved the small coin purse into the seller's calloused hand and stepped back. "You sure, miss?" the man asked, one brow raised. "He's barely breathing." "He looked like that so someone would get more coin," I said. "I don't want him to die on the road." The seller shrugged and spat. "Three silver and he's yours." I counted the coins once and then again, my fingers steady even though my heart thudded in my chest like a trapped...
I woke to a woman's shouting and the smell of cheap perfume and spilled wine. "Open the door! If you've got the gall to sleep with my son, at least have the decency to open up!" she screamed. I blinked at the ceiling, my head pounding in a way that said someone had rearranged my insides overnight. A man—stiff, shirt half unbuttoned—was sprawled on the bed beside me, his face pale and still. My hand found the thin sheet and I curled it around myself. "Who—" I started. "Wake up!" I...
I married a man for money. "I did it for the money," I told myself in the mirror the night before the wedding, as if repeating it would make the lie lighter. The gown fit too perfectly. The ring was heavy and warm on my finger. I tasted luxury and a thread of guilt, and then I tasted a pain so sudden none of it mattered anymore. I died on my wedding day. When I opened my eyes again, the air smelled different — cooking oil, wet concrete, cheap soap. My head throbbed with a kind of...
I woke up with a man’s shirt over my shoulders and a buzz at the edge of my skull. “Hey,” I said to the bathroom mirror. My reflection looked like a bad idea that had followed me home. “Don’t panic,” the mirror said silently. I didn’t listen. Last night had been a blur of neon and music. My friend Muriel had dragged me to a bar. I had laughed too loud, danced too bad, and somewhere between the second shot and the third song I kissed someone I probably shouldn't have. I held the...
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 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...
I found the pregnancy test in the kitchen trash at midnight. "Two lines," I said, and my voice sounded small in our quiet apartment. Hugo was at the sink, elbows wet from dishwater. He turned slowly, like someone waking from sleep. "Is it yours?" he asked. "No," I said. "Whose—" He walked toward me the way he always crossed a room: quietly, without fuss. He smiled with a confusion that made my stomach flip. "It's ours," he said. I laughed because my first instinct was...
I never expected to wake up in a neighbor's bedroom, pressed against someone who used to be the center of my life. I never expected to feel his throat roll under my lips and hear my name breathed like a prayer in the dark. "Juliet," he said, voice like velvet and hurt, "please, don't leave me." I answered before thinking. "Okay." The word floated between us and then became a splinter. Knox's eyes opened. The hazy, forgiving look vanished and was replaced by something sharp, colder than...
I woke to a taste of dust and the wooden slats above my head. "You're up?" my mother said before I could even open my eyes. Her voice had the shape of a question but the weight of a report. The room smelled of damp cotton and boiled tea. I blinked. Everything was wrong and exactly as wrong as a headline printed in font the size of a child's fist. "1973," the newspaper on the little cabinet said in a way that made my stomach flip. "You're mumbling," my mother said. She had already...
I grew up thinking my place in the world was to eat well and sleep better. My father, Edsel Soto, taught me that with a grin and a wave of his fat hand. He was proud of being lazy as if it were a skill. I was his only daughter and therefore excelled at being coddled. "Eat more," he always said. "If you eat well, you never know when hunger will come." When Minister Leon Ballard asked for my hand, my father squealed like a child at a pastry cart. "Carter, did you hear? Leon Ballard...
I will tell everything in order, and I will not hide the small, painful things. My name is Kamiyah Mikhaylov. I grew up in the dim basement of Sterling Ziegler's house because my mother, Martha Lynch, worked there as a cleaner and my father, Vaughn Fisher, was their driver. I knew from the start that we lived in the shadow of money. I also knew, in the small bright corner of my chest, that I loved Sterling. "Can we be together?" I asked him once, sophomore year, with a stupid hope. "No...
I have a rule about exes: never make them comfortable watching you suffer. I kept that rule in theory and then discovered how much better it is to watch them get uncomfortable instead. "I can't believe he cheated on you," Audrey shouted into my ear over the bar's music as she poked my shoulder. "Neither can I," I hiccupped, trying to sound tougher than I felt. "Apparently I'm very easy to replace." "You are not replaceable," Audrey said. "You're Kaede Barrett. You're...
