2nd Place Winner – Flash 405, April 2026: “Saudade”
Nonfiction
As you await your Hangover Brunch on the Cathedral Café patio, you watch the two old men chatting on the bench beside the Correio Rápido building, while catching snippets of the French conversation at the corner table (“Bien sûr—non!”) and occasionally glancing at the framed movie poster for Macao, Robert Mitchum gazing at Jane Russell, left hand on hip, right hand crooked over her head in a dancing finger snap, wreathed in a diaphanous robe (“C’est la même chose toujours!”) but—diverting your gaze from this spatially ironized mockup of a simulacral Macau—you stretch your neck in an attempt to glimpse the Portuguese-Macanese restaurant two doors down, but it is not possible from this vantage point, and, as though to mitigate this minor disappointment, your Hangover Brunch arrives, and it takes a while (“Ooh la la!”) to devour this cornucopious offering, after which you step away from the patio to enjoy a post-prandial smoke, and now you can see Restaurante Escada, the sight of which plunges you into nostalgia as you puff on your Furongwang Medium cigarette, for as you scan the restaurant’s neoclassical yellow and white frontage and its narrow balcony, you are also peering into the irrecoverable chasm of your past: it was behind those ornate iron balcony balustrades, at a small table, seventeen immense years ago—in another life—that you and your girlfriend of the time enjoyed a sublime Christmas dinner, posting pics from that very spot on a new platform called Facebook, trying to capture the glories of the occasion, and (Facebook) friends in Canada raved over the exquisite location where you were savoring your festive Macanese meal, your photos of each other on the balcony also revealing the old stone stairway descending to the tessellated sidewalks of the Avenida de Almeida Ribeiro, and you find yourself reflecting that the present is underwritten by stratified epochs of lost time that counterbalance the fluidity and flux of fleeting moments with accumulated subterranean solidity and depth, but you are shaken from this revery when the clock of the Sé Catedral da Natividade de Nossa Senhora sounds the doom of the eleventh hour, reminding you that the Livraria Portuguesa, down on the Rua de São Domingos, is opening its doors, and signifying that it is time to consign your brunch to the digestive processes and to go in search of a far more magnificent repast—the feast of words.
Judge’s Comments: This piece is incredible, painting a distinct image that precisely captures the theme. The attention to detail transports us directly to this memory of the present and the future, injecting quotations to truly satisfy the senses.
Mark Crimmins’s flash fictions and nonfictions—often hybrids of the two—have been published in numerous literary journals, including English Studies in Latin America, Columbia Journal, Kyoto Journal, Queen’s Quarterly, Flash Frontier, River Styx Magazine, Portland Review, Tampa Review, Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, Apalachee Review, Litro Magazine, Reed Magazine, and Flash: The International Short-Short Story Magazine.
Photo by Ferdi Nusaputra