Have You Hugged Your Shirker Today?
Pete Segall

I DIDN’T THINK I was capable of kidnap until I abducted my wife’s lover as he got off a train. He sat quietly in the back seat while I drove to the empty patch of forest preserve I’d scouted out. It only took one broken finger to get him to admit to the affair and swear he’d end it permanently. He fell to his knees and cried. I was overcome with a metastasizing sense of disappointment. “You were supposed to be aggressive and strong,” I shouted. “She already had a pliant man.”

~

Pete Segall is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where he was a Truman Capote Fellow. His work has appeared in Conjunctions, Electric Literature's Recommended Reading Commuter, SmokeLong Quarterly, Necessary Fiction, decomP, Matchbook, and elsewhere, and is forthcoming in The Literary Review. He’s received fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center and Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. 

~