Quick reads you can finish in 10-30 minutes
Found 1964 short novels
"I wrote it twice." "You wrote a love letter and dropped it twice?" Eri Mueller's laugh was a little too loud for the quiet corridor. "Once," I said. "I dropped it once. You don't have to point out my clumsiness to half the floor." "Sorry." Eri smiled, then turned serious. "Who did you write it to, Lailah?" "I—" My mouth went dry. "Dylan Flynn." Eri blinked. "Dylan Flynn?" "Yes." I hugged the envelope to my chest like it was the only brave thing I owned. "You mean Dylan...
I found Foster D'Angelo when I could not even read a single letter. You would think the story would start with a palace, or with me born under a red curtain, or with banners and silk and some title stitched into my bones. "I raised the ninth prince" — people always expect that grand beginning. But I was a butcher's daughter. My name is Elise Oliveira. I grew up with knives and wet stalls and a house that smelled of blood and river mud. I learned how to gut a sheep before I learned how to...
I slapped him in the cafeteria. The sound of my palm against his cheek was so loud I could feel it in my teeth. "Hey," he said, stunned. "This is the first time anyone's hit me. Figure out a way to save my face, will you?" I swallowed. "No." Then I ran. I heard his laugh behind me. "Heh. Shy girlfriend, huh?" My name is Hailey Bowen. I had been hiding my crush for a year and a half, keeping it folded like a secret note. When the boy I liked, Finley Ashford, and a girl who'd been...
I stood at the bus stop at five in the afternoon, my black backpack heavy on one shoulder. "This is my first day of high school," I told the empty air and the sky like an old postcard. "Don't be dramatic," I told myself immediately. "Just go in, sit down, survive." I had done well in middle school until physics arrived like a wall. Every time we opened that book, the letters lined up into hills I could not climb. Still, the entrance exam worked out, and here I was at Yunhua High, the...
"I accept the sentence." My voice floated across the Hall of Unending Water and hit the carved dais like a small, cold stone. I felt the ropes bite my wrists. I felt the bindings that had been tied to me since dawn. I watched faces tighten, soften, then harden. "Do you?" Emory Moretti said from the sunlight-side seat, his voice like hard light. "Kyla — you want this? You admitted to everything?" "I do," I said. "I did what I did to keep more people alive than would have died if I did...
"Sister, are you avoiding me?" he closed in, step by step. I pressed my lower back against the pearwood rail of the corridor, breath caught like a bird. Below us the engagement party hummed with music and polite laughter; anyone who looked up could see us through the mezzanine balustrade. "You did that on purpose," I snapped. Galileo Horn smiled, not a warm smile. "Don't look at me like that, Ava. Don't you hate me?" "Or," he lifted one brow and let the corner of his mouth tilt in a...
"Happy birthday. November twenty-third. I mean it." Nolan said it like a statement of law, not a plea. He folded the paper back in his hand and sat very still across from me at our small kitchen table. "I heard you," I said, and my voice sounded far away to my own ears. He nodded once and did not smile. I folded my dress into a suitcase, then folded the suitcase into a silence. We finished our last night together in a quiet that had nothing to do with peace. I found his old pilot...
I woke up in a silk dress and almost did not recognize my own hands. "Camila?" Francis said, and then he laughed. "You laughed," I told him. "Right when you saw me." He put his hand over his mouth like a boy caught with a trick. "You look like Sabine," he admitted. "I almost called you by her name." "I am not Sabine," I said. "I am me." He blinked. "Right. Of course." "Why did you laugh?" I asked. He shrugged, still smiling. "Because you looked fragile. Because you wore...
“I hurt him.” I said it soft, but the room heard it like a shout. “Cameron, go slow,” Martha said, but I was already at the top of the stairs, barefoot, moving like a ghost to his door. I pushed the door open. Alexander was half-rolled on the bed, his shirt stained with blood and sweat. He was patching himself with strips of cloth. I froze. “You’re bleeding,” I said. He did not move at first. Then he made a small sound, the same low voice I had heard for years, and he said,...
I was counting coins when the messenger arrived. "Keilani," he said, breathless, "your ledger—" "Don't tell me," I cut in, not looking up, "the capital burns and they want my silver?" I smiled because the rumor had always been this: money changes crowns faster than steel. He bowed. "Her Highness, the late emperor has passed. The eldest prince returned with a written edict." "An edict?" I finally stood, smoothing my sleeves. "Bring it to me." The court would split like a cracked...
I woke to the taste of smoke and iron in my mouth, and the dark smelled like someone else's breath. "Stay still," a voice said, low and careless. "Be useful and be quiet." My fingers remembered the seam of the sheet; my head remembered a thousand hopeful ways to live a different life. My eyes remembered the one reason I had walked into that house trusting it would turn into something else: him. I shut my eyes on the shame. I had been wanting him for more than half my life. "Nicol—" I...
"I said I'm wearing a white sweater," I told the phone like I always did, because strangers deserve a little help when they're trying to find me. There was a pause on the other end. "I'm the Maserati," the young voice answered casually. I laughed, half to myself, half because I couldn't help it. "Right. Sure." The deep-blue Maserati stopped in the traffic like it belonged to the road. I took two steps back without thinking. The car looked like money looked if money could sit...
I woke up knowing three things: I had been given a second chance, my face would not be cut again, and I would not play the spare for Janessa Harvey ever again. "I don't understand," my mother said from the doorway, voice sloped in the same old way. "Why do you want to stay away from home? Why are you so spiteful?" "Because," I said, and the word felt like a small, sharp stone in my mouth, "I want to be Elise Wells. Not her shadow." "Elise," she called me a name she had never used as...
I remember the night the bar closed because the summer tourists had thinned and the town finally let out a tired sigh. The bartender, Gunner Donovan, left a soft yellow lamp on the counter and creaked upstairs. I walked down slow steps and found him—Houston Huber—reclined in a lounge chair, a picture book on his chest, white collar open, long legs crossed, asleep like a man who carried the sea in his bones. "He looks like he could be a painting," I whispered to myself as I moved closer. I...
"Splash!" I clawed at cold water and swallowed half a river. "Hold on!" a voice shouted. I kicked and my foot hit a rough hand. The hand grabbed my ankle. I slammed my heel into it, hard. "Let go!" I coughed. "Let go, you—" The hand let go. I shot up through the black water and gulped air like a dying thing. I spat river water. A man in dirty clothes dragged me onto the bank and didn't say a word. He bent, ripped the leech off my calf with the flat of his shoe, and then walked...
I remember the first dream like a wound that never fully healed. In it, a woman in wedding white smiled at me and promised a life of quiet light. In the next breath she held a sword and spat words that burned. "Rowan Marino, you are ruined. A dying thing cannot be my husband." I woke with my hands cramped, with the world tasting like iron and salt. My name is Livia Bush. I am from the silver‑leaf Snow‑Dove clan. I was born blind. I learned the shapes of the world by sound and touch, by the...
I open the book because the night smells of candles and old paper. "Do you think the dead hold grudges?" I ask the page as if it will answer. A shadow knocks my head with a cool fingertip. "Are you still reading at this hour, Imani?" Griffin Lindstrom teases like he used to, like the world hasn't split itself into before-and-after. I slap away his hand. "It's late," I say, though my voice trembles a little. "You should—" He laughs. "You would say that even if I were a ghost." The...
I woke to the smell of hotel soap and a stranger's breathing against my collarbone. "Morning," a husky voice said, and the word sounded like a small confession. I blinked at the ceiling, slow and careful, as if the room itself might be a trick. My mind crawled through the fog until it found a shape: Ismael curled against my chest, lashes heavy, his face softer than the last time I had let myself look at him properly. "You're still here," I said. My voice came out flat, as if I were...
I remember the birthday banquet as a bright room full of candles and old soldiers’ laughter. I remember my father — Emperor Mario Montgomery — lifted on the throne like a giant who had carried us across a storm. I remember, most of all, the moment he folded as if a rope had been pulled from his knees. "I will say it plain," he said first, breath rattling. "Keep things simple. No show." "Father," Dalton Clemons answered, voice steady as he poured wine. "We will honor your wish." He had...
"I don't want your pity," I said, and closed the file drawer with a sharp breath. I had no time for pity. I had a child to bring home, a mother to keep safe, and a life half-broken that I needed to piece back together. Buying a secondhand apartment was supposed to be one tidy, sensible step. It was supposed to be a small, clean line from chaos to normal. "Okay," the agent said, flipping a pen between his fingers. "So, the inspection is final and— "—we agreed on the deposit," I cut in....
