Still Soft With Sleep (A Novel based on a true story) - Part One: Six Months, Ch. 2

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 Over the week and a half, we’ll serialize excerpts from of our remaining Finalist’s unpublished novels, and then subscribers (both free and paid) will vote on a Winner to be fully serialized here on the Substack.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

  • Part 1, Chapter 1

• 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 sun was banded suddenly with the dark of June clouds and as we left we ran into Astana, stoned and slanting towards us along the boards through the dunes. Her brothers and a few of their friends were there in their lifted Jeep getting wasted in the clouded dark. Their father was in their young faces, but not Astana’s. I wondered at her a little, so thin with her breasts pressed so tightly together, her hair blonded and poking imperceptibly from her bikini bottoms and I was glad Elvis had such a beautiful woman. The brothers knew about our college from Astana and were intrigued by Elvis and I and couldn’t believe we had swum from the boat to shore. After they left sliding joyfully through the sand we walked a ways down the beach to where it widened and deepened and the waves seemed finally to pick up with dignity and reprisal.

The breadth of the beach made it a natural stage, and Elvis put on a great performance for us, flirting with the waves and getting seduced into them, and Astana looked at me all excited and I knew what she was thinking and I said, “Go join this wonderful play that I’m watching,” and she ran like a child merging into the scenery and played with Elvis, splitting the beachstage into perfect thirds by ...