My story “The Only Act She Kept” was named a finalist in Story Unlikely’s 2026 International Short Story Contest, out of more than 1,400 submissions. My story “The First Cell” placed second in the same contest.
I need to say where the finalist came from. My mother has Alzheimer’s. She has always loved Alexander Calder’s Cirque Calder, the little wire circus he built and performed by hand. I started thinking about what it would mean to lose nearly everything and keep one thing, and the story grew out of that. Celine Appel, who has early-onset Alzheimer’s, loses her memories one by one until almost nothing is left except a single tiny trapeze artist from that circus. She keeps returning to it across decades, and finds it again at the Whitney.
So this one is for my mother, who gave me the circus a long time before I knew I’d need it.
Thank you to Danny Hankner and the Story Unlikely team.
Dana Wall | Stories & Scripts 
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