Still Soft With Sleep (A Novel based on a true story) - Prologue

We kick off the second week of the second round of PILCROW’s Serialized Novel Contest, with our second Finalist’s first chapter. Over the next two weeks, we’ll serialize the first few chapters of our remaining Finalist’s unpublished novels, and then subscribers (both free and paid) will vote on a Winner to be fully serialized here on the Substack.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

• 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.

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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World was in the face of the beloved,

but suddenly it poured out and was gone:

world is outside, world cannot be grasped.

Why didn’t I, from the full, beloved face

as I raised it to my lips, why didn’t I drink

world, so near that I could almost taste it?

—Rainer Maria Rilke

Keep those tears hid out of sight.

—Mick Jagger

⚬─────────✧─────────⚬

PROLOGUE

I’m standing on the balcony looking across the park and she is calling me back to bed.

She’s tired but there is play to her voice. “It’s cold Adam, close the door.” She hits “door” with a lilt and I can hear her smiling and rolling in the sheets. “What are you even doing out there?”

What am I doing out here? I’m looking across the park from the 30^th floor, up in the violet and the glass of Manhattan. It’s December and there’s been a frost in the rainfall. The winter winds are pouring in billows through the fluted slalom of Broadway, curling the cold open brim of Columbus Circle and putting a tilt in the frosted trees. Days before, when I saw the park from the woman’s apartment in the daylight, it stretched out like a lawn at my feet, full of unpetalled trees and evergreen needles like the sharp burrs one stepped across as a child barefoot ...