Still Soft With Sleep (A Novel based on a true story) - Part One: Six Months, Ch. 3

We conclude the second week of the second round of PILCROW’s Serialized Novel Contest. Over the week and a half, we’ll serialize the excerpts of our remaining Finalist’s unpublished novel, and then subscribers (both free and paid) will vote on a Winner to be fully serialized here on the Substack.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

  • Part 1, Chapter 1

  • Part 1, Chapter 2

• 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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The food was cooked and we filed into the kitchen of the “cottage,” about forty people or so. Caleb announced himself and smiled at Elvis ear to ear, pointing at me saying, “I can’t believe they let this guy in.” Caleb’s eyes were always in crescents, even when he wasn’t stoned, which he probably was. He wore a velvet suit and pocket square, looking like a blonde Don Draper with his square jaw and his hair combed back, but with enough volume in the hair that he looked more like if James Dean had made it out of adolescence and into business with the style of the five-o’clock shadow.

We sat at the table with a man who looked like Tom Cruise’s character Les Grossman in Tropic Thunder. I realized later it was Chris’s father, Frank McConnel whose brother had bankrupted the Dodgers. Elvis’s brother kept asking him questions about Ireland and England and you could tell how much money he was worth because he took as much time as he felt like before answering questions in one syllable, “Yeah” or “No” or “Sure.”

After a few painful rounds of this, a full sentence mercifully emerged to one of Jamie’s questions.

“Did you see any futbol games when you were in England this year?”

“I saw Chelsea and Arsenal.”

“You saw Chelsea ...