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Poetry & fiction

Literature

Poems and passages from fiction, in their original languages.

Poems

Original text

Fiction · English

For You, I Seek the Rudis

Act I: Blood. Selected passages from an unpublished working manuscript.

Selected passages. These are excerpts, not complete chapters.

01 / Excerpt · Unpublished working manuscript

Prologue

The narrator describes the coordinated preparations of servants, spectators, and condemned fighters before the games.

This was Rome’s oldest art: to make unequal things move as though they had chosen the same music.

For You, I Seek the Rudis · Act I — Blood · Prologue · p. 2

02 / Excerpt · Unpublished working manuscript

I. The Sand

Before entering the arena, the condemned man asks to finish repairing a bench.

He had spent an afternoon in the store once, holding a board while a joiner worked it. There had been a strip of shade by the door and a smell of cut wood. At the end they had sat on what they had repaired. He wanted the bench finished. He wanted to sit there again while someone else was called to the yard.

For You, I Seek the Rudis · Act I — Blood · I. The Sand · p. 4

03 / Excerpt · Unpublished working manuscript

I. The Sand

During the fight, the condemned man has seen a woman looking at his face rather than at his wound. Her concern unsettles the detachment that usually lets him endure violence.

He knew what to do with iron. Turn, brace, shorten the breath. The gaze gave him no instruction. It made the wound his.

For You, I Seek the Rudis · Act I — Blood · I. The Sand · p. 10