1st Place Winner – Flash 405, April 2026: “Saudade”
Nonfiction
There is a ghost who lives just a few steps to the left of my life. I feel her sometimes, brushing past me like a draft from a door I forgot to close. She is the version of me who got everything I once prayed for, the life I almost lived before the world cracked open and remade me into someone else.
She is not cruel. She is not jealous. She is not even sad. She is simply there, an echo with a pulse, a shadow with a heartbeat, a possibility that never solidified into flesh. I see her most clearly in moments of stillness, the soft hum of a room that has not yet decided what it wants to be. She stands in the doorway, only observing the life that unfolded in her absence. Her presence is a soft pressure, like a hand resting on the shoulder of someone who does not know they are alive.
In her world, I stayed and the ground did not split open beneath me. She carries the safety I once believed was waiting for me if I could just be good enough, quiet enough, small enough. She is everything I thought I would become before I learned that becoming is a kind of breaking.
Sometimes I imagine stepping into her life, slipping into her days like a dress I outgrew. I imagine the mornings she wakes without scanning the air for danger. I imagine the version of love she learned, the one that did not bruise. I taste the salt of a sea I never crossed.
She watches me with a kind of mournful tenderness, as if she knows I survived a story she never had to live through. And I watch her with something like grief, something like envy, something like love for a self I will never meet. We are mirrors facing each other across an impossible distance, her life untouched by ruin, mine rebuilt from it. When she reaches for me, her hand passes through my shoulder like light through dust. When I reach for her, my fingers close on nothing but air.
Still, she lingers. Not fading, not approaching, only waiting in the doorway of a life that will never open. Her silhouette is a map of a country I can never inhabit, a coastline I can trace but never touch.
And the ache of her is the only proof she ever almost was.
Judge’s Comments: Incredible, genius piece. The longing for what could have been is palpable (“I taste the salt of a sea I never crossed.”) and revelatory (“Becoming is a kind of breaking.”). The feeling of what could be is universal, one that we as individuals grapple with in every decision we make. What I truly love about this piece is the unique angle it takes on saudade—the longing for what could have been, but never had a chance to be. And finally, the gut-wrenching truth of this melancholy is made tangible in “The ache of her is the only proof she ever almost was.”
Leanne Babcock is a Pennsylvania-based poet who publishes her collections under the name Leanne Sheetz. The author of The Architecture of the Self and The Heart’s Own Geometry, her work—spanning poetry, flash nonfiction, and visual narratives—dives deep into beautiful contradictions, the unscripted parts of life, and the messy, beautiful process of becoming. Fascinated by human consciousness, she infuses a poetic intention into everything she touches, treating both creative tech and everyday life as landscapes to be explored. When she isn’t mapping out the heart’s architecture or volunteering, she is usually daydreaming, building entire worlds in her head, and navigating a wonderfully ordinary life with her kids.
Photo by Getty Images