Morgan Talty, a winner of the 2021 Narrative Prize, is a citizen of the Penobscot Indian Nation, where he grew up. He is the author of the debut story collection Night of the Living Rez, winner of the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize, the Sue Kaufman Prize, and the New England Book Award, among many others, and the novel Fire Exit (Tin House, 2024). Talty teaches at the University of Maine, Orono, and is on the faculty at the Stonecoast MFA in Creative Writing as well as the Institute of American Indian Arts. He lives in Levant, Maine.


READ THE 2021 NARRATIVE PRIZES PRESS RELEASE



A LISTING OF NARRATIVE
PRIZE WINNERS



The Gambler

A Story

by Morgan Talty
1.

The first time I drove a car, I was with my father. I can’t remember what car I drove. My father didn’t even own one; he was notorious for crashing his vehicles, and the state eventually took his license away.

I was eleven. Or maybe twelve. It was summer, and I was visiting him, as I always did during those green-bloomed and hot months in Bridgeport, Connecticut, when my mother let him see me on his terms. To get to Bridgeport, my mother usually sent me down on a Greyhound bus from downtown Bangor, Maine, and she always complained how Greyhound shouldn’t be so far from the Penobscot Nation, that there should be one right off the reservation in Old Town. But there wasn’t one, and there never would be. The only bus terminal was in downtown, right out back of a bar that like the station itself no longer exists.

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