Still Soft With Sleep (A Novel based on a true story) - Part One: Six Months

We continue the second week of the second round of PILCROW’s Serialized Novel Contest, with our second Finalist’s first chapter. Over the week and a half, we’ll serialize excerpts from of our remaining Finalist’s unpublished novels, and then subscribers (both free and paid) will vote on a Winner to be fully serialized here on the Substack. Finalists are awarded $500; the Winner $1,000.

Our Finalists are:

• Vice Nimrod by Colin Dodds

  • Chapter 1

  • Chapter 2

  • Chapter 3

  • Chapter 4

• Still Soft With Sleep by Vincenzo Barney

  • Prologue

• Don’t Disappoint by Martin Van Cooper

While the traditional organs of American letters continue to wither, we recognize the need to forge a new path. If you believe in what we’re doing, PLEASE share and subscribe and spread the word.

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Vincenzo Barney is a Vanity Fair contributor. He wrote Still Soft With Sleep for his senior thesis at Bennington in 2018. He is working on a book about Cormac McCarthy and Augusta Britt, a story he broke for Vanity Fair last year.

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PART ONE: SIX MONTHS

That day at high noon Elvis and I took a ride across the Vineyard Sound to Chappaquiddick beach. Chappaquiddick is the easternmost shoreline of Martha’s Vineyard, the Massachusetts island where Elvis and I had spent the month of June together in his house called Mayflower. Elvis and I were coming back from a quick trip to New York City without our phones or belongings, depending entirely on the clothes at Elvis’s brownstone on the Upper West Side, and I entirely on Elvis’s money which paid for my flight both ways. We dove through the clouds and by the time we landed the sun parted them above us. We would have flown back directly to the Vineyard except we were to spend a day in Falmouth where Elvis’s girlfriend Astana had a summer home and then boat over with her father. While Astana’s father gave Elvis a tour of his house, a mansion not as big or shiplike as Mayflower, and of an inferior tax bracket, they left me to my own devices on the dock. Happily, I put my shoes on the pylon and climbed through the open hatch of the sixty-foot catamaran and laid on my back in the pristinely made bed below.

The master bed had no personality to it, and I found no evidence of a woman. I uprooted ...