Safe Harbor by Morgan Talty

Coffee and Cigarettes. 

There’s a simplicity to Morgan Talty’s stripped-down writing style that really works for me. There’s no fluff, filler, or unnecessary detours. Just tightly focused storytelling that lets small, seemingly inconsequential details evoke emotional resonance. It’s a narrative approach that taps directly into pure raw emotion without ever spelling things out and Talty pulls it off again and again in Night of the Living Rez.

He uses this same technique in Safe Harbor, which follows the narrator visiting his mother at a rehab facility. She keeps asking him to bring her cigarettes. They drink coffee together. Too hot at first, then cold enough that it has to be reheated in the microwave. Outside, the narrator notices an exterminator checking rat traps along the building. On the surface, these details feel odd or mundane, almost random. But that’s kind of the point. Talty lasers in on the narrator's pensive observations and awkward moments with his mother to show how emotionally distant and fractured this relationship is between them. The big feelings aren’t expressed through dramatic conversations; rather, they are buried beneath small rituals, silences, and observations that say more than the characters ever do out loud.

We are only given brief exchanges between mother and son, yet we still get a strong sense of their shared history and unresolved grief hanging between them. When the narrator explicitly reflects on generational trauma (whether parents or children suffer from it more), it feels less like a thesis statement and more like a thought he’s been carrying around for years, never quite able to resolve it.

The ending is abrupt and unsettling. The mother has a seizure and is rushed to the hospital, and the narrator, following behind, ends up in a serious car accident and is taken to the same hospital. It’s jarring, and I’m not entirely sure what to make of it, but it too feels intentionally unresolved. The story doesn’t offer closure or answers, just the sense of shared, unspoken grief and damage that continues to ripple outward. If anything, that ambiguity reinforces Talty’s approach: trauma isn’t neatly explained or wrapped up. It just keeps showing up in these seemingly inconsequential ways.