From Surgipelago, the Beach Surgery encyclopedia
Pugil (collected in Pastoral Scanlines)
This article covers the collected edition version of Pugil in Pastoral Scanlines. For the standalone web version (with characters renamed), see Pugil (alternate version).
*Pugil* is a prose narrative by C. W. Smith appearing in Pastoral Scanlines (Selected Works 2020–2025), the authorized collected edition assembling Smith's fiction, poetry, and plays. The title refers to the classical boxing term; the piece examines a baker and a writer navigating a two-on-one fistfight, an underwater embrace, and the liminal space between domesticity and violence.
In the collected *Pastoral Scanlines* edition, the baker is explicitly named Leif and the writer Katita—direct appearances of the protagonist pair outside the novel proper. The earlier standalone web version preserved identical plot and atmosphere while renaming them Max and Adria. This textual bifurcation has become significant in fandom scholarship on Leif and Katita as Instruments of Return: the characters' capacity to travel renamed across Smith's work is treated as evidence that Leif and Katita are not fixed identities but recurring psychic patterns—"instruments of return" that surface wherever the author's oeuvre turns inward to examine failure, love, and domestic survival.
The piece's central scene—the alarm-clock baptism at the public baths—directly echoes *Antinomicity*'s underwater awakening, suggesting a unified meditation across Smith's oeuvre on how bodies survive one another. [citation needed] Multiple scholarly dissertations read *Pugil* as a compressed Beach Surgery: six chapters folded into one narrative, the three injuries rendered as a single two-on-one bout.