By Connor White

When Walt pulled the van into a parking spot beside the baseball fields, the Watkins kid was standing out in centerfield, unaccompanied, a cigarette dangling from his lips and a mitt hatted on his head as he beat the carcass of a dead raccoon with a stick.

By Jisoo Hope Yoon

In the dark I dream only of bottomless mimosas. When I wake my neck is stiff, a sharp sideways pain like the grind of a screw rusted orange. I right my head and immediately lock eyes with a middle-aged man sitting across from me, too-tight-suit revealing the contour of a soju belly from nights downing pork grease and alcohol to satisfy his boss’s whims.

By Casey Brooks

Somewhere there is a heartbeat on the bus. To sit upright was a seldom ignorable terror, no matter how much has been lost. It makes it bulge out, defiling form and function. Today was different, the earth was, for the first time, in transit with a radiant body. Its light melted away the sticky mold that was a life resigned to semi-consciousness.

By Ivy Char

It was Celia who first called me H. Although we were close, having known each other since kindergarten, I had learned to stray from topics that might turn to points of contention, as was apparently the case with the letter. And besides, there existed the distinct possibility, advanced by the satisfied look on her face, that this was all some sort of friendly challenge. “Why ‘H?’” I wondered, and wondered often.

By Alex Wexelman

Roughly a decade after it became the predominant style in the art world, Minimalism—a pared down writing style influenced by the likes of Ernest Hemingway—became a popular trend in literature

By Maeve Barry

Stefan’s adopted mom told him I got into Showstoppers cause I’d have no problem wearing the skanky outfit. Stefan’s adopted mom told him this to make him feel better because he didn’t get in. He told me. I am eight and three quarters and I don't care.

By Alex Wexelman

The short story, like many of Friedman’s, concerns a working-class Jewish family and the intra-family struggles for success and financial freedom in America.

By Sergei Linkov

Sometimes, when my mother partook of vodka, she would become convinced that she was the illegitimate daughter of some nobleman. She spoke of his estate on the Neva river, where she recalled herself toddling along poplar-lined alleys and hiding alder cones under the Roman columns of the gazebo.

By Victor Barall

Now there is a gradual dying away, a diminution by degrees of the small talk among the great ones as the rumor diffuses through the stadium that the sovereign has been seen stepping out of his chamber, or if not the sovereign, then at least the large white feather that invariably accompanies him on the days he dons, at a rakishly oft-kilter angle, his black velvet beret.

By Carlie Hoffman

It was October. An unseasonably warm day. I know because I was wearing shoes without socks. Near the campus of John F. Kennedy High School, the stray geese crowded on the brown grass by the traffic circle, like groupies as if the honking horns of the cars were a rock band.

Besides the fact that I happened to be living in one of them, all the houses looked exactly the same: blue clapboard and white vinyl trim stippled to look like real wood. Houses with landlines and hot tub hookups and no hot tubs attached. Horseshoe-shaped driveways, single acre lots. Idyllic little prefab Kennedy compounds. Pretty much the entire development had been deserted since Labor Day, which was when I’d arrived on the scene, still tan from the final summer of what I’d already begun to think of as my Old Life.

The only son Garry wanted wasn’t even a blood son. A reject, a castoff. Thomas, this non-son, had a forehead scooped into a kind of slight horn. Pinched-out lips. Laugh like a throttled chicken. But Garry knew from his years training airborne cadets that without him, the boy’s life was a coin flip: Thomas, a fatherless fuck-up, or Thomas, a true leader of men.

Today at work I walked in on Sarah in the work bathroom adjusting her outfit in the full-length mirror, she jumped when I opened the door. I found myself thinking […]

The woman, in order to have sex with her husband, had to write it all out after it happened. When they were young, before the kids, and they had sex […]

It’s not even noon, but the sun’s way high, and Johnny’s on the jukebox. I’m sitting in the world’s shiniest diner, staring at the woman who has the most beautiful […]

My mother wants to sell me oils. The oils smell like fresh-cut flowers and citrus fruits and the fishbowl stench of a house that’s been left unoccupied for several months. […]

I had a job over the summer, not because of financial necessity but because my mother held an unshakable belief in the virtue of work. She said that I needed […]

It is within reach, what I need most; creative time alone. That is, no co-educational tits occupying the airspace above my shoulder as I labor to paint them, pink as […]

Here is a world, black and body, a mother who is protected and timeless, a father who is her husband and stays. a midwife with hands worth more than a […]

Columbia Journal is excited to announce the winners and finalists of our 2022 Spring Contest, which was judged by Garielle Lutz, Aaron Coleman, Colleen Kinder, and Natasha Rao. We want to thank everyone who entered the contest for sharing their work with us, as well as our four wonderful judges, and express our congratulations to the winners and finalists.