That’s what I texted my ol pal Craigbeard the other day. I continued:

     His response:

     The description made me ache.

     So much has changed, and whenever I talk with my millennial friends, we get all misty-eyed about it. But I don’t see that same yearning on the other ends of the spectrum. Boomers seem happily retired, and what does Gen Z know of a time before their arrival? But us in the middle, raising families and grinding out the work week? We remember. We know. And the ghost of the past haunts us like a bad dream.

     Someday, when I’m old and gray, will I look back upon my memories, as if they were figures behind glass, and try to justify them to the next generation? And will they lift the wires attached to their temples long enough to roll an eye, as if to say, what a story, old man.

     But it wasn’t fiction for those of us who were there. I will remember. I will never forget what we had. Couldn’t forget.

     Even if I tried.

 

     Our annual short story contest was - once again - a huge success, with over 1,400 submissions received! Our benevolent volunteers (and give them a virtual hand, as we couldn't have done this without them) worked tirelessly to sift these down to the top three winning stories. So here we are, proud to announce our winners, finalists, semi finalists and honorable mentions (and may I mention that all Paying Members who receive honorable mention or higher receive personal feedback from our very own editor-in-chief, of which numerous stories this year did!). Congrats to the winners and everyone whose name made it this far - the competition was fierce, and you earned your certificates. So plaster them all over your social media feeds to proudly declare to the world, “I almost won an international writing competition!…but not quite.”

    Another thing to consider: last year we changed the name from “Honorable Mention” to “Highly Honorable Mention”. Why? Because too many competitions out there have diluted the term by handing certificates out to every story with an ending. But here, if you received a (highly!) Honorable Mention, that means your story was in the top 2% of submissions - a major feat!

    And if you don't see your name up here, do not despair! Next year's contest is right around the corner, and let's face it, yours was probably, almost certainly, next in line: top 3% for sure!

 

Winning Stories
1st place ($3,000 cash prize) - Doomsday: Clipboard Required by Lefki Karantoni 

(will be featured in the December issue)

2nd place ($1,000 cash prize) - The First Cell by Dana Wall 

(will be featured in the October issue)

3rd place ($750 cash prize) - Driving Test by Gobgob Macintire 

(will be featured in the September issue)

 

Finalists
Paddlegirl by E.M. Dasche

The Forgetting Room by Hallow Blackwell

The Nice List by Brian Belefant

The Only Act She Kept by Dana Wall

The Rubicon by Charles Sasser

The Twenty-Year Echo by Steph Stockhill

Weeping Tree by Wulf Moon

 

A Life More Dangerous by Mike Barretta

Enjoy 30 Minutes of Ad-Free Dreaming by Zack Harmes

Mother’s Milk by Steven Sax

The Lockout by Mack Mani

The Women Who Swallowed Light by Dana Wall

The Man Who Ate Measures by Jeffrey-Michael Kane

Where Good Men Sleep by Brittany Rainsdon

 

Dream Girl by Diana Olney

Gifting Murder by Thomas Butler

Ice Zombies by Scot Noel

Jardine’s Wake by Philip Brian Hall

Of Madness and Verse by Zack Harmes

Season of Noticing by Lynne Golodner

Sylvia was Here by Lea Grant

[Query][Life][Other] by Miriam Ruff

The Baker’s Baby by Lydia LiVecchi

The Girl Who Conjured the Wind by Moira Hansen

The Rabbit’s Neverland by Olivia Yang

The Relationship Coach by Kefuoe Khosola

Two Trees in a Distant Valley by Jess Aitken

Weeds by Suzanne Hamlin

What the Hands Remember by Danielle Blum

 

Castles in the Sky by Rick Duffy

 

Bloodless by Christopher Fielden

Daddy Issues by Diana Olney

Last Contact by Stephan James

Men of Color by Mike Kearby

Red Meat Diet by Mike Rusetsky

Taking Jenny Home by Sarah Cannavo

The Grim Reaper’s Game by David Hankins

 

     If you see your name up there (aside from the reprint category), send us an email requesting your certificate (we have a ‘Don’t Ask Don't Send' policy, so if you don't ask, then we won't send, if that wasn't already clear - unless you're a Member, of course; we will send those out automatically!).
     For those who didn't land on the above board, listen up. Next year's contest is right around the corner, and once again we'll be giving away thousands of dollars! Do you want to take a real shot at winning? Then give yourself a leg up by doing the following:
     1. Read our back issues. This is the single best thing you can do to prepare yourself - see what the authors we're publishing are putting out there, and get an idea for what we're after.

     2. Learn from the best by reading our Writer's Gym, which features in-depth articles on writing by some of the best writers in the business.

     3. Join our community. Talk about all things writing. Learn. Grow. Become the best writer you can be!

     4. All of the above are accessed through a Membership at Writer Level. Food for thought: only 18% of stories entered were by Paying Members, yet 15 out of the top 32 stories (that's 46%!) were from Members. Clearly, these writers are on to something.

by Dana Wall

 

 

 

The nurses say I don’t remember anything.

     They are wrong.

     I remember the circus.

     My name is Celine Appel. I know this because it’s written on the bracelet they snapped on my wrist, white plastic, the kind they display in hospitals, so they don’t accidentally give someone else’s death to you by mistake. I am fifty-one years old, though some mornings I wake up and I am seven, and some mornings I wake up and I am a hundred, and some mornings I wake up and I am just a feeling—a color, a sound, a smell of sawdust and copper wire—and I don’t have an age at all.

     They tell me I have early-onset Alzheimer’s.

     They tell me I was married once. They tell me his name was Richard. They show me photographs: a man with a square jaw, a woman who looks like me but isn’t, standing in front of a house I’ve never seen, smiling the way people smile when they’re trying to prove something.

     I look at the photographs, and I feel nothing.

     But when I close my eyes, I see the trapeze artist.

     Wire and cork. The size of my thumb. Swinging through an arc of air no bigger than a breath.

     And I remember everything.

     Paris. 1997.

     I was twenty-two, and I had fled there to forget a man—not Richard, someone before Richard, someone whose name the disease has eaten but whose leaving I still feel like a bruise on a bone, deep and permanent and aching when the weather changes.

     I had no money. I had a suitcase full of books I’d already read and clothes that didn’t fit the weather. I had a fellowship to study something—art history, I think, or literature, or the way women disappear into the margins of both—and I had three months to become someone other than the girl who got left.

     I wandered into the Centre Pompidou on a Tuesday because it was raining, admission was free, and I needed to sit somewhere that wasn’t my rented room with its narrow bed, its view of the airshaft, and its silence that sounded like accusation.

     And there, in a gallery I’d entered by accident, I found him.

     Alexander Calder. Cirque Calder.

     Five suitcases, opened like the chambers of a heart.

     And inside: a world.

     They were so small.

     That’s what I couldn’t get over. The acrobats, the clowns, the lion tamer with his tiny whip, the elephant fashioned from cork and wire, and something that might have been a bottle cap—all of them small enough to hold in your palm, small enough to lose, small enough to bring with you wherever you went.

     Calder had carried them. That’s what the placard said. He had packed his circus into suitcases and taken it from studio to studio, apartment to apartment, performing it for anyone who wanted to see. He would crouch over the ring and move the figures with his own hands, making the trapeze artist swing, making the tightrope walker wobble, making the clowns tumble and the horses gallop, and the whole impossible world come alive.

     But Calder was dead. Had been since 1976, the year I turned two.

     And so the circus was silent now.

     The figures frozen in their vitrines. The trapeze artist caught mid-swing, waiting for hands that would never come again. The suitcases open like wounds that couldn’t close.

     I stood in front of the glass for two hours.

     I watched the archival film they played on a loop beside the display—Calder’s hands, large and gentle, moving the figures through their paces. The trapeze artist swinging. The clowns tumbling. The elephant raising her trunk in greeting.

     His hands made them alive.

     Without his hands, they were only wire.

     I pressed my palm against the vitrine and I thought: I know what that feels like. To be frozen. To be waiting for someone who will never come.

     And I swear—I swear—the trapeze artist’s wire arm trembled.

     The nurses don’t believe me when I tell them about the circus.

     They think it’s the disease. They think I’m confabulating, which is their word for the way the mind creates stories to fill the holes the forgetting leaves. They pat my hand and say, That’s nice, Celine, and they write things in their charts, and they move on to the next room, the next patient, the next woman who has lost the thread of herself.

     But I’m not confabulating.

     I remember the way the wire caught the light.

     I remember the way the cork bodies seemed to hold their breath.

     I remember the film of Calder’s hands, and how I wept watching them, because those hands knew something about love that I had never learned—how to pick something up without breaking it, how to make something move without forcing it, how to bring a thing to life and then, when the performance was over, how to lay it gently back down.

     Richard never learned that.

     Richard picked me up, and he broke me, and he put me back wrong, and when I couldn’t give him children—when the doctors finally told us it was him, his body, his failure, after years of him letting me believe it was mine—he laid me down so hard I still haven’t gotten up.

     But in the film, Calder’s hands are tender.

     In the film, the trapeze artist flies.

     The circus traveled, after Paris.

     I followed it the way some women follow men—obsessively, across borders, without logic or self-preservation.

     I saw it at the Tate Modern in 2003. Only fragments that time—a handful of figures in a borrowed vitrine, the suitcases absent, the context stripped away. It was like seeing a word removed from its sentence. I understood what each figure was, but not what they meant together.

     I saw it at a retrospective in Berlin in 2009. More complete, but still frozen. Still waiting for hands that weren’t coming. The museum had mounted photographs of Calder beside the vitrines, his face patient and kind, his fingers wrapped around wire that would never move again.

     I saw components at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in NYC, pieces lent out like body parts, the elephant here, the lion tamer there, the coherence of the circus scattered across institutions like a family after a war.

     And everywhere I went, I looked for the trapeze artist.

     She was always frozen. She was always mid-swing. She was always waiting for me to see what no one else saw—that she was still alive in there, still ready, still hoping that someone would open the vitrine and pick her up and make her fly.

 

#

 

     Richard left me in 2015.

     He said it wasn’t about…

About the author:

     Dana Wall is the winner of the 2025 Online Fiction Contest at Columbia Journal for “Dissolution Studies.” Her work appears in Brevity, River Teeth, Tupelo Quarterly, Hunger Mountain, Strange Horizons, and The Maine Review, among others. She has received two 2025 Pushcart Prize nominations and a Best of the Net nomination. Her story “The Red Migration” (Story Unlikely) was selected for Tangent Online’s 2025 Recommended Reading List. She earned her MFA from Goddard College and lives in Manhattan Beach, California.

 

by By M.D. Smith IV

 

By the time Victor Trenchwick rose from his coffin, the sun was still up—because he had forgotten, once again, to account for daylight saving time.

     “Fantastic,” he muttered, slamming the lid shut as a blade of sunlight scorched the velvet lining. “A creature of eternal night undone by government bureaucracy.”

     The coffin rattled as he waited for the burning to stop. Somewhere above him, a neighbor’s radio chirped a morning weather report. Victor lay very still, feeling personally attacked by the concept of Tuesday.

     Victor was not a good vampire. Not morally—though that too—but technically. He lived in a rented studio apartment with blackout curtains that didn’t quite meet, a smoke detector that shrieked every time he tried to light a single ceremonial candle, and a landlord named Mrs. Kowalski who seemingly believed Victor worked night shifts at a call center and “needed more iron and maybe a girlfriend.” Because of his peculiar habits, Victor worried she could be on to him. But he paid his rent in cash—consistently, of course—and she never said a word. Perhaps she knew the truth, that his undead existence was held together by duct tape, poor decisions, and a lease agreement that explicitly forbade “open flames, bats, or unregistered crypts.”

     Once the sun retreated like a smug bully, Victor pushed the coffin lid open and stood. The cape he wore was crooked, with one clasp missing, its collar perpetually refusing to stand up dramatically. He glared at it.

     “Don’t think I don’t know you’re doing this on purpose,” he said, thumping the collar with his forefinger.

     Dinner consisted of a blood substitute labeled Crimson Vitality Plus!—which tasted like pennies dissolved in dime-store olive oil. He drank it anyway, because hunger was worse. He’d once tried fresh blood from a consenting donor, but he’d sneezed mid-bite and apologized so much she gave him a blanket and walked him home.

     He attempted to practice his hypnotic stare in the bathroom mirror.

     “I vant …” No.

     He tried again. “You vill do as I say!” Also no.

     He leaned closer, squinting. “Please?”

     The mirror, which did not reflect him, offered no feedback. Victor suspected it was disappointed.

     Instead of being consistently weak, tonight, he decided, would be different. Tonight, he would hunt properly. Terror. Mystery. The old ways. He even packed his cape with extra flair, nearly strangling himself in the process.

     Outside, he chose the worst possible alley: brightly lit, security cameras everywhere, and directly behind a CrossFit gym that smelled aggressively of sweat and optimism.

     His intended victim turned out to be a personal trainer named Bryce with forearms like sculpted marble and a bespoke water bottle that cost more than Victor’s coffin.

     “Whoa,” Bryce said, blinking. “Is that a cape? Is this for a Marvel Comics thing?”

     “I am a creature of the night,” Victor hissed, immediately tripping from his own dramatic flourish and face-planting into a recycling bin.

     Cans clattered. A raccoon watched, judgmental.

     “Is this a mugging?” Bryce asked. “Because I don’t carry cash.”

     “No,” Victor groaned, tangled in banana peels and crushed seltzer cans. “It’s … a lifestyle choice.”

     Bryce offered a hand. Victor slapped it away on instinct, then felt bad and waved apologetically. He fled into the night before Bryce could offer protein powder or, worse, encouragement.

#

 

     Back home, Victor attempted to salvage dignity by transforming into a bat. Instead, he became something between a hairless ferret and an angry umbrella, flapped twice, smacked into a ceiling fan, and reverted midair.

     He landed hard.

     “Evolution has betrayed me,” he announced to the dust.

     He tried drinking from a goblet to feel aristocratic, only to discover it was tomato juice he’d bought by mistake because the label said “Robust and Bold.” Out of habit, he hissed, but his swirling cape knocked it over. He watched as it soaked into the rug, forming a shape that vaguely resembled Transylvania.

     “That feels targeted,” he said.

     At midnight, his reflection-less phone buzzed. A text from the Vampire Council.

     Victor typed back: I SOWED CONFUSION. IS THAT ADJACENT?

     Three dots appeared. Disappeared. Then reappeared.

     He opened the handbook, immediately dropped it when it burst into flames from a forgotten sunbeam reflecting off a spoon, and added “curse spoons” to his mental list of enemies.

     Lonely, Victor called his only undead friend, Edgar, a vampire who fared somewhat better in his modern life adaptation, and was organizing a “Be Kind to Vampires Week,” because, “They were (once) human, too.”

     “You need branding,” Edgar said through a mouthful of something that crunched. “TikTok. Lean into irony.”

     “I am irony,” Victor said.

     “That’s the problem.”

     Victor hung up and crawled back into his coffin, feeling every one of his four hundred years.

     “I was promised eternal power,” he murmured. “Not eternal incompetence.”

     Still, the next night he tried again. He remembered sunscreen for the coffin cracks. He watched a tutorial titled Vampirism: The Basics. He even practiced flying in the hallway until Mrs. Kowalski banged on the wall with a broom, screaming, “Stop that! You’ll crash into a wall.”

     Eventually, Victor accepted something no council handbook prepared him for, or told him how to correct—he simply wasn’t terrifying. He was inconvenient. Mildly unsettling. The supernatural equivalent of a printer that jams but never quite breaks.

     And somehow, that felt worse.

     He lay back, cape wrinkled, ego bruised, listening to sirens wail in the distance. They weren’t for him, but he smiled anyway.

     Eternity, after all, was a long time to keep doing everything wrong, every time, and Victor was nothing if not consistent.

~~~

About the author:

     M.D. Smith IV of Huntsville, Alabama, writer of over 350 flash stories, has published digitally in Frontier Times, Flash Fiction Magazine, Bewilderingstories.com, and many more. Retired from running a television station, he lives with his wife of 64 years and three cats. https://mdsmithiv.com/

 

Once upon a time, I used to post a list every year of my recently published short stories that qualified for awards.

 

Today, I don’t. I should be agreeably surprised, not to say astonished, if I ever got close enough to a Hugo to throw a rock, let alone collect a rocket. I should hope, however, that my failure was not due to my race, politics, or sex.

 

Being a white male is not an automatic ticket to privilege. I was born on the wrong side of an industrial city in the north of England. Steel dominated local employment, but it was just at the beginning of the period when the UK began losing its comparative advantage in such industries to cheap labour economies.

 

As it happens, I was also born smart. I did nothing to earn that, nor did I create an educational system that was able to convert intelligence into upward social mobility. Yet, as a result of these two things, I was able to go to the best school in the city, on to Oxford via an open scholarship, and then into the Diplomatic Service.

 

Meanwhile, many white males in my home city had no jobs. By the last quarter of the twentieth century, the area had 20% unemployment. Sure, I had to work hard, but a lot of other people worked hard and got nowhere, because they didn’t start with similar breaks. I try very hard not to forget those folk from whence I came because, “There but for the grace of God go I.”

 

Within ten years, educational ‘reform’ pursued in the name of social justice had destroyed the ladder I climbed. The entire city was sending less students per year to Oxford and Cambridge than my old school used to send on its own. ‘If not everyone then no-one’ is an understandable attitude, but wrong.

Ability is not enough. We all require education, and we require opportunity as well. We should aim to create that necessary infrastructure for everyone, not to take it away from those who are lucky enough to have it. In short, we need to level up, not down*.

 

Talent should not be allowed to wither because some people lack opportunities to develop, but neither should art be decried because some artists were lucky enough to enjoy opportunities.

For literary awards, judge the work, not the author. There’s only one relevant question.

 

Which work is the best?

 

* I hate to have to use prepositions with transitive verbs, but that’s language evolution for you.

 

About the author:

     Philip Brian Hall is a graduate of Oxford University. A former diplomat and teacher, at one time or another he's stood for parliament, sung solos in amateur operettas, rowed at Henley Royal Regatta, completed a 40 mile cross-country walk in under 12 hours and ridden in over one hundred steeplechases. All this was a long time ago.
     Today, he dwells somewhere among the bleak moors of Slamannan, six hundred feet above sea level in Central Scotland, where, when he is not writing, he indulges his other hobbies of photography and gardening. Few explorers venture into these trackless wastes to seek him out, but he is probably still alive, since periodically he surfaces for long enough to submit stories to publishers.
     He has had short stories published in the UK and Canada as well as The USA. His work has appeared in Analog, Galaxy’s Edge and several anthologies, including five (soon to be six) volumes of the Flame Tree Gothic series, as well as online publications. His novels, The Prophets of Baal and The Family Demon are available in e-book, in paperback, and the former as an audiobook.

Listen on:

Dear Story Unlikely,

    I found Story Unlikely through Wulf Moon's Wulf Pack Writers group which I am a member of. Moon always encourages us to submit, and through the Pack, I have witnessed the great things people say about your magazine from being published by you. I know you put a large emphasis on quality, and your guidelines are humorous, which I really appreciate. You guys always pull a smile, or even a laugh from me. Thank you!
 

Sincerely,

Michelle J. Diaz

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