One Simple Thing

When his father leaves town, twelve-year-old Rodney Culver's mother takes up with Otis Dell, a fry cook at the local diner—and a well-known petty thief. While Rodney resists the man's influence at first, Otis soon draws the boy into his small-time criminal world. After a simple heist goes violent...

Warren Read is the author of a 2008 memoir, The Lyncher in Me, about his discovery that his great-grandfather had incited a lynching in 1920, and the 2017 novel, Ash Falls. His fiction has been published in Hot Metal Bridge, Mud Season Review, Sliver of Stone, Inklette, Switchback, and The Drowni...