WELCOME TO THE TROPICS
Jenna B. Morgan
Ignoring the DON’T WALK sign, Malik dashes across Independence Avenue against the frigid wind.
As he pushes through the front doors, he hears Vera call: “Welcome to the tropics!” from the front desk. The temperature inside the Botanic Gardens is closer to an equatorial paradise than a D.C. winter.
Audrey pops her head out of the office. “Is it just terrible out there?”
“It’s only flurrying so far, but the wind is brutal.”
“The roads will be solid ice by rush hour!” Audrey predicts, “And at my age—”
“At our age,” Vera interrupts, “it takes more than a snow flurry or two to scare us.”
On his first day, Malik wasn’t thrilled to find he’d be interning under two white ladies in their 70s. But, as it turns out, he really likes the old birds.
***
Bill leans back on the bench and tries not to chuckle. He’s been watching the young man and the young woman – the only other people up on the canopy walk – for fifteen minutes or so now. They’re about to meet for the first time, if one of them can just work up the gumption. She keeps walking past him, and he keeps feigning deep interest in the hothouse flowers at his feet. But then he turns to watch her go.
And who could blame him? In the middle of January she’s dressed for July – a yellow sundress bright enough to rival any bloom in the place.
He wonders if he’d do it all over again, given the chance. No, he doesn’t envy them their youth. Being young was hard work and he’d done it already – gone to school, fought in a war, met his sweetheart and married her, raised up their kids. He’d done it all right.
Except go first. The husband was always supposed to go first.
***
“Look!” Greg cranes his neck back.
“At what?” a female voice responds.
It’s her. Sundress girl.
“Snow.” He points straight up.
She tilts her head back and stares. “It’s like a snow globe, like we’re inside one.”
“A reverse snow globe,” Greg amends, watching the white flakes disappear against the warm greenhouse glass. “I’m Greg by the way.”
She pulls her eyes from the ceiling. “I’m Jacqueline – Jack, but spelled J-A-C-Q, which is confusing as hell, I know.”
“I like your dress.”
Jacq shrugs. “I look crazy and I guess technically I am. I have that seasonal disorder thing. Instead of sitting in front of a sun lamp, I come here. Like I can absorb the perpetual summer of this place by osmosis.”
“That doesn’t sound crazy at all.”
They lapse into silence, lean back to watch the snow.
“So, you come here often?” Jacq asks after a minute, wincing at her own delivery. “Sorry, I didn’t mean for that to sound like a terrible pick up line.”
Greg shrugs. “Just when I need a moment of Zen. We had fourth grade field trips today. If I had to answer one more question about how astronauts pee… I work over at Air and Space.” He motions in the direction of the museum. “Do you work right around here too?”
***
Penny walks another slow lap around the reflecting pool; instead of looking at the plush foliage and vivid flora, she’s scanning the jungle for other people.
She’s been stalking her next bloom all morning – Heliconia angusta – and waiting for the perfect moment to pull the cuticle scissors from her pocket.
It started last semester. She was taking this class on obscure artists and fell in love with Mary Delany.
When Queen Anne died in 1714, Mary was a lady-in-waiting-in-training. So instead of the life at court she’d been groomed for, she was married off to a gouty old man and exiled to his drafty castle in Cornwall. But he only lived four more years. And in widowhood, Mary bloomed. She became a Bluestocking and an amateur botanist. And she knew everyone – Jonathan Swift was her pen pal. She took piano lessons from Handel.
Her greatest work was her Flora Delanica, a prolific botanical catalog that recreated flowering plants with paint and paper and pieces of real leaf and blossom pressed and dried. She called them paper-mosaiks.
After seeing reproductions, Penny had waded deep into her aunt’s flower beds and started her very own Flora Murphica.
Months later, she doesn’t know if she’s paying homage or just cribbing Delany’s brilliance. But it’s the best work she’s ever done.
***
Just as the front desk phone begins to ring, Malik’s cell buzzes in his pocket.
“It’s a beautiful day at the United States Botanic Gardens—” Audrey begins the standard greeting, then stops abruptly.
“Immediate departure – federal offices closed,” Malik reads from his phone.
Audrey looks like she needs to sit down and maybe a paper bag to breathe into. “That’s just what the recording said.”
Vera has already pulled up a weather radar on the front desk computer. “It’s going to be much worse than anticipated.”
“The roads are sure to be treacherous. And the sidewalks! At my age, one little slip and–”
“Stop fussing, Audrey. I’ll drive you home, just like last time,” Vera stops her. “Malik, can you inform our patrons we’re closing? There should be,” she consults her tally, “just four in the greenhouse currently.”
***
“Excuse me,” Malik approaches Greg and Jacq, both still watching the snow. “I’m sorry, but we just received notification we’re closing early. All federal offices, actually.”
“Really?” Jacq asks. “It doesn’t look that bad.”
“Apparently it’s going to get worse.”
“Well, that means all the Smithsonians are closed too,” Greg comments.
Jacq pulls out her cell. “My office too. Just got the email.”
***
“Sir?” Malik stops in front of the bench Bill is sitting on. “Sorry – we’re closing early. The weather.” He points to the glass panes of the greenhouse roof.
Bill looks up. “Well, I hadn’t even noticed. Snowing pretty good now, isn’t it?”
The young man smiles. “Yeah, it is. We’ll be locking up in about fifteen minutes,” he says before turning and moving away toward the stairs.
Bill grabs his cane and plants it on the floor; he rocks back to gain some momentum and heaves himself upright.
***
“Miss?” Malik asks, walking up to the last patron.
“Yes?” Penny’s voice comes out high and squeaky as she turns around. She clutches the incriminating cuticle scissors tight and hidden in the palm of her hand.
“I’m sorry; I didn’t mean to startle you.”
“I… I...” What can she say to defend herself now? What would they do if somebody walked into the National Gallery of Art and started snipping up a Manet with cuticle scissors?
“Are you okay?”
Penny gawps like a goldfish, moving her mouth but making no sound.
“I’m just letting everybody know that we’re closing because of the snow.”
“Snow?”
He points. “We’ll be closing in just a few minutes.”
“A few minutes,” she repeats.
***
“Did you need something?” Audrey asks Greg curtly, wondering why on earth this young man is loitering in the vestibule in the middle of an emergency weather closure.
“I’m just waiting on…” He gestures toward the greenhouse. “She had to go to the bathroom.”
A moment later, before Audrey is even done muttering about lollygaggers, Jacq appears, transformed. Instead of a bright yellow sundress, she’s wearing a white coat with a furry collar. Her hair is caught up under a blue hat that matches her scarf.
“Did you see it yet?” She holds up her cell phone. “Service suspended until further notice at all aboveground stations.”
“Already?” Greg glances out the front doors and is surprised to see a coating of white on the sidewalk.
“What was that, young lady? About the Metro?” Audrey asks anxiously.
“Metro shut down service to aboveground stops. So those of us going to King Street –”
“Or Fort Totten,” Greg volunteers.
“Aren’t going anywhere,” Jacq finishes.
“You take the Metro, don’t you, Malik?” Vera asks him as he re-enters from the greenhouse.
“Why?”
“No aboveground service.” Greg shows the message on his phone screen.
“What about buses?” Malik asks.
“Lots of delays and cancelled routes. Adding more every minute,” Greg responds, reading from the Metro Alert app.
“I thought you were closing?” Bill asks as he enters the crowded vestibule.
“The Metro is all shut down,” Jacq tells him.
“Even to Fairfax?” Penny asks the last one out of the Gardens.
Jacq nods.
Bill makes his way to the front desk, asks Audrey: “Can I use your phone?” He has a cell phone, but almost never remembers to charge the damn thing.
“There is a payphone designated for patrons—” Audrey begins.
“Oh, for goodness sake!” Vera hands Bill the receiver of the front desk phone.
As Bill dials, Vera turns to Audrey. “If they’re closing Metro, the roads will be jammed. Maybe we should stay here.”
Before she can say anything else, Bill raises his voice in frustration: “Now, Keith, you’re not listening to me. I’ve already got my car right here downtown. Give me the address.”
He pauses.
“Son, I’ve been driving in snow for longer than you’ve been alive!”
He pauses again, longer this time.
“Well, the state of Ohio certainly saw fit to issue me a driver’s license!” he shouts before slamming down the receiver. “Horse shit!”
Audrey’s eyebrows shoot so far up they almost disappear into her white hairline.
“My apologies,” Bill says, sheepish. But after a moment he adds, “But getting old really is horse shit.”
“Amen,” Vera agrees.
Audrey, looking pained, changes the subject. “Regardless of Metro closures or anything else, we all need to be leaving now. Within thirty minutes of implementation of the IWP, the premises should be cleared and locked.”
“Are you leaving in this?” Jacq points at the glass front doors. The snow is falling fast and thick, obscuring all but the barest outline of the Capitol’s dome just half a block away.
“The procedure—” Audrey starts.
“You and I are staying put,” Vera interrupts. “And I’m sure as shit not throwing these people out.”
“Vera!” Audrey is scandalized.
“What are they going to do, fire us? We’ve been around longer than the dinosaurs!” She gestures in the general direction of the Natural History Museum.
Malik is shaking with silent laughter.
“What?” Vera demands.
“Sure as shit? Last month you sliced your finger with pruning shears and said oh, sugar snaps!”
“He started it!” Vera points at Bill.
He puts his hands up like a bank robber caught in the act. “Not me!”
“Horse shit!” Vera counters, then giggles.
“That’s quite enough!” Audrey says in her sternest, most grandmotherly tone. “As the senior-most staff member here, Vera, you do have the authority to override policy. And, of course, the responsibility to explain any breaches to the Executive Director.”
Vera rolls her eyes, then addresses the group. “Anyone who wants to stay is welcome. Malik, please show our guests to the East Orangerie.”
“If we are going to be hosts, we will be gracious hosts. I’ll start some coffee,” Audrey huffs, then marches off.
***
Soon, they’re all settled in the orangerie with beverages in hand.
Jacq has shed her hat and coat and fans herself with a glossy Botanic Gardens brochure as she scrolls through weather updates on her phone. Greg texts his neighbor and sometimes dog-sitter: Stuck downtown. Can you take Charlie out? Feed him? Kibble still on top of fridge.
“I had a question for you two,” Bill addresses Audrey and Vera. “The birds that live in here – why don’t they fly into the glass?”
“Birds fly into glass because they see the sky reflected and think it’s open space,” Vera explains.
“Here, the mullions and muntins,” Audrey points and traces first a vertical line then a horizontal line in the air, indicating the metal dividers between the panes of glass, “break up the reflection.”
“I had two birds fly into my sliding glass door last year; the robin just stunned himself pretty good, but the wren died.”
“There are some products – netting, stickers – designed to interrupt the reflection,” Audrey volunteers.
“I bet I can just crisscross some masking tape,” Bill muses.
At the same time, Penny and Malik re-approach the impromptu beverage station – Malik to pour more hot water over his once-used teabag, Penny to mix up another mug of hot chocolate from a powdered packet.
“You come here a lot, don’t you?” Malik asks Penny.
Penny freezes. “Um… I…”
“I just noticed you a couple of times because you had paint in your hair. I wondered if you were an artist.”
“Just an art student,” she forces out.
Malik points to himself – “Just a botany student” – and smiles. “Do you know our Photography and Art Policy?”
Penny shakes her head and pretends to be really interested in her half-mixed hot chocolate. She’s lying. She can quote it line and verse, especially the part that stipulates “plants may not be moved, cut, rearranged, or handled in any way.”
“You need a permit to set up an easel,” Malik continues, “and the rules are pretty strict, but I bet I could get permission to let you stay after hours or before hours if the light is better.”
She’s fantasized about it – being here all alone, no one watching. “Really? I’ve been working on these sketches, they’re not that good, but –” Instead of just her sketchbook, she pulls a tumble of other books and papers from her backpack.
“Here, let me help you.” Malik is already crouching.
“No, no! Really! I’ve—”
“What’s this?” He holds up a folded square of translucent waxed paper.
Penny’s face is crimson. “It’s…”
Malik unfolds the square and lifts out the barely-pressed bloom.
Jacq stands and takes it from Malik. She twirls the flattened red and white petals on the short, severed stem. “Did you cut this?”
“Our Christmas heliconia!” Audrey gasps.
“I just…”
“You just burglarized a federal institution!” Audrey shouts.
“But why would you –” Malik starts.
“To keep the beauty all for herself?” Jacq guesses.
“Or just because she knows she’s not supposed to. We catch people trying to climb into the exhibit and touch the Moon Lander all the time,” Greg contributes.
“No!” Penny finds her voice. “I’m not stealing – it’s art!”
“Art?” Vera asks.
“Like Mary Delany.”
Vera’s look shifts from consternation to interest. “Mary Delany the botanist?”
“And artist,” Penny adds.
“Irrelevant!” Audrey bulldozes. “You are a thief, and will be dealt with as such.”
“Were you always here stealing? Every time?” Malik asks.
“Enough,” Vera cuts them off. “Everybody sit down.” She gestures to a long table.
“This,” Vera begins once they are all seated, “has something to do with Mary Delany? Explain yourself, please.”
Penny takes a deep breath. “Mary Delany was – she was the first collage artist. Two hundred years before Picasso and Braque even called it collage, this 18th century Englishwoman was mixing media, using dried flowers and paper and paint and ink to create these botanical images. They documented specimens, but they’re so much more than that. Her flowers – they look nearly alive.”
“As opposed to actually alive?” Audrey snatches the decapitated bloom from Jacq and shakes it.
Vera presses Penny: “And you do the same kind of work?”
Penny nods. “But there are all these new methods of preservation now. And I’m playing with the idea of re-articulation without completely losing the sense of deconstruction. I’m trying for still-fragmented wholes.”
“Whole?” Audrey cuts in. “This was part of a whole and healthy plant until you stole it in direct contravention of our policies. And who knows how many others you’ve taken! Or how many plants you’ve harmed!”
“I have rules!” Penny defends herself. “I don’t take a bloom unless there are several others on the same plant. And then only if there are twice as many buds as blooms.”
“So you know there are more flowers on the way.” Bill nods approvingly.
“Completely immaterial!” Audrey insists.
“Now, Audrey. Haven’t you been known to go to the Mediterranean and pick a lemon on occasion?” Vera asks. “She’s making art. You’re just making tea.”
Audrey’s face turns pink.
“Personally, I don’t see the harm.” Bill shrugs.
“What if everyone did it?” Jacq asks. “The place would be stripped bare.”
Greg jumps in. “Over at Air and Space we have to spend a huge portion of our budget on security and surveillance. If guests would just follow the rules, we’d be able to reallocate that money to acquisitions.”
“But the exhibits here grow back,” Bill points out.
“Our policies are in place to protect the Botanic Gardens and the enjoyment of all who visit,” Audrey insists. “Violating our policies is a serious offence deserving of equally serious consequences.”
“Consequences?” Penny shrinks down in her seat as she asks.
“I will see that you are permanently banned from this facility and the arboretum. And I will confer with my counterparts at the Smithsonian Museums, the National Monuments—”
“But I have to go to the galleries for school!”
“She’s an art student,” Malik supplies.
“Where?” Audrey demands.
“Corcoran,” Penny mumbles.
“Perhaps the Director of Admissions would be interested to know the caliber of person attending his institution,” she pauses. “Surely theft of federal property is grounds for expulsion.”
Penny blanches.
“Hold your horses, Audrey,” Vera interjects. “We will decide together what the appropriate next step may be. But first I want to hear more about her work. I am a great admirer of Delany’s.”
“I saw her work for the first time last semester.” Penny can’t help but smile. “Artists think a lot about balance, about negative space.”
“Negative space?” Bill asks.
Penny begins to move her hands as she speaks, becoming more animated. “The background, the blank space in a drawing or painting that gives the eye a place to pause.”
“Like the mullions for the birds.” Bill points to the greenhouse glass overhead.
“Think about something like Van Gogh’s Starry Night. All those variegated blue brushstrokes –” Penny swirls her hand in the air “– they draw the eye from one star to the next to the next. They create an interval, a sense of passing time.
“But Delany uses it differently. She weights the negative space – she painted the paper with layer after layer of India ink to create this perfectly opaque, saturated black. Like Kapoor’s Vantablack, but two hundred years ahead of the curve.
“She’s using negative space to suspend this perfect slice outside of time. Her flowers never fade.”
“Why can’t you just take a picture?” Jacq asks.
“Because photographs have become ubiquitous.” She holds up her phone. “We take pictures of the foam in our coffee and our new pedicures and the notes on the board at the front of lecture halls. The images are so completely mundane we can’t even see them anymore.”
“But why our flowers?” Malik turns back to the question at hand.
“There are things here I can’t get anywhere else. And I’m a broke art student. And it’s winter.” She gestures outside to the still-falling snow.
“Which brings us back to consequences. Lofty ideals and artistic passion aside, this young woman is a thief. And has no right to be here,” Audrey asserts.
“Let’s discuss this privately,” Vera suggests, motioning for Audrey to follow her back to the offices. “Malik, stay here with our guests.”
“And keep an eye on her.” Audrey points an accusing finger.
As soon as they are out of earshot, Vera begins: “Audrey, I don’t like it any more than you do, but don’t you think trying to get her expelled is a bit extreme? And you cannot throw somebody out in this weather.”
“So we harbor a known delinquent? Possibly through the night? Will we stay awake in shifts to watch her?”
Vera sighs and rubs her temples. “She won’t take anything else.”
“You can’t be sure. And what if she cuts from the orchidaceae? Or the saffron crocus?”
“For God’s sake, I’m a curator not a warden,” Vera snaps.
“You don’t have to worry about kicking me out or guarding me. I’m leaving,” Penny says, surprising them. Malik is right behind her.
“Corcoran’s only like sixteen blocks away.”
“Is it even open?” Malik asks.
Penny shrugs. “If not, I’ll just go to the Metro and wait for it to start up.”
“We can walk with you,” Greg says, entering the vestibule with Jacq, both already bundled up.
“If Metro is still down and we can’t find a cab, we’re going to sneak into the ice rink at the Sculpture Garden,” Jacq explains.
Greg shrugs. “Worst case scenario, we come back and spend the night here.”
***
Twenty minutes later, Penny pounds on the glass of the locked front door until Malik comes running.
She sticks her head in as soon as he gets the door unlocked. “We need help! Hurry!” Then she is gone again, back into the snowy dark.
Without even bothering with a jacket, Malik follows. He pops his head back in almost immediately, yelling: “Call 911!”
Greg and Malik come together through the doorway, supporting a bedraggled man between them.
“Don’t bother calling. I already did. They said just to get him somewhere warm, that they can’t get an ambulance through,” Penny explains. “I told them we’d be here.”
“Who is he?” “Where did you find him?” Audrey and Vera ask simultaneously.
“The Metro station. There were a few other people waiting, but he was off by himself, shaking. Nobody would go near him,” Penny explains.
“Well, he’s not shaking anymore,” Audrey observes.
“Which is not good,” Bill pushes past everyone, tries to look in the man’s eyes, snaps his fingers loudly right in front of his nose but gets no reaction. “The body shakes to warm itself. When you stop shaking –”
“Hypothermia?” Greg guesses.
Bill nods grimly. “Move him to the greenhouse. Lay him down. We need blankets, hot water bottles, warm liquid.”
“The story time mats from the Children’s Garden,” Malik says, already running.
“I’ll get the first aid kit!” Vera hurries into her office.
“If we have towels or rags, plastic bags, and warm water, I can put together makeshift hot water bottles,” Greg volunteers.
“No, you help move him,” Bill orders, pointing to Greg and Penny too. You improvise hot water bottles,” he points to Audrey. “Warm water not boiling.”
Suddenly, Jacq heaves the door open and, panting, pulls a loaded-down shopping cart into the vestibule.
“He wouldn’t leave without it,” Penny explains.
“Leave it,” Bill orders. “And help her,” he points to Audrey. “Everybody move!”
He grills Greg and Penny as they head to the greenhouse. “He was conscious when you found him. Was he speaking?”
“Slurring,” Penny supplies.
“And could he stand on his own?”
“He didn’t want to get up and tried to push us away. He was trying to take off his coat, already had his shoes off and we had to get them back on. We half carried him here,” Greg replies.
“Lay him there.” Bill indicates the blankets Malik has already spread on the floor. “Gently!”
He covers the man’s torso with a stack of blankets.
“Hypothermic reactions look a lot like drunkenness. And people are quick to assume mental illness, or that an indigent person is dangerous, and fail to help. I saw dozens like this in the ER every winter. The appalling indifference of ‘good people’ – how many walked right on by as a fellow human being froze to death on a street corner?” As he speaks, Bill checks the man’s pulse and breathing, holds a hand to his brow, looks at his fingernail beds.
“I found these in the kit!” Vera runs in with an armful of warm compress packs. Bill takes them, cracks them and places them under the blankets at the man’s armpits, neck, and groin.
“Have to heat the core first – heat the limbs now and it’ll force cold blood to the heart and cause cardiac arrest. Just in case, is there a defibrillator here?”
“I’ll get it!” Malik volunteers.
Audrey and Jacq bring the bagged warmed towels and Bill adds them under the blankets. He has Audrey make tea, and tries to spoon some of the liquid into the man’s mouth. “The warm, humid air will help, but hot liquid in his stomach will help even more,” he explains.
“Go find the local police number – don’t tie up 911 – and see if dispatch can give us an ETA on that ambulance. Tell them the patient is stable, but still unconscious, and that Dr. Bill Smecker is attending and will accompany him to the hospital.”
“We have the local fire and police numbers at the front desk,” Audrey says. Unable to help in the greenhouse, Malik, Penny, and Greg follow her.
As they enter the vestibule, Audrey covers her nose and mouth. “Oh, good Lord!” In the warmth, the rank smell of the shopping cart has bloomed and become almost eye-watering. “Put that thing outside! We’ll never get rid of the stink!”
“He wouldn’t want us to put it out. He was afraid someone would steal it I think,” Penny argues.
“No one is likely to steal it in this,” Malik points out. The storm has picked up again – through the glass doors it is nearly blizzard-like.
“And trust me, it would be a slow get-away. Those are not snow tires,” Jacq adds.
“I still don’t think it’s right,” Penny says.
“Nonsense,” Audrey insists. “Out it goes.”
Even Penny is covering her face now – the longer the cart stays in the humid warmth, the stronger the smell grows.
“Okay, okay,” she relents.
Audrey makes the call as Greg moves the cart outside, letting in a blast of cold air and snow. Unsure how they can be of help, and eager to stay out of the way, they loiter in the vestibule, looking up the weather forecast and radar and metro alerts on phones and the front desk computers.
“Was there another vagrant there with him?” Bill enters the vestibule fifteen minutes later, walking as fast as his cane allows. “He’s conscious, not particularly lucid, but he’s asking for his buddy over and over. Very agitated.”
“Maybe we should go back to the Metro, check nearby,” Jacq suggests, already pulling her coat back on.
“We would’ve seen him I think,” Penny argues, “And nobody at the station said anything about anybody else with him.”
“Oh, Jesus!” Greg dashes for the doors, pulls the cart back inside, and starts digging, throwing cans, trash bags, and stained blankets onto the floor. “I’ve seen this guy panhandling outside the Metro. He has a dog!”
Under the insulating layers of garbage, Greg finds the scrawny mutt, perfectly still.
“Oh, fuck,” Greg is crying as he picks up the dog and cradles him. “Oh, fuck. I put him back outside in the cold. I killed him.”
“Let me see, let me see,” Bill places one hand on the dog’s chest, another over his nose, waits. “Not dead, nearly though. Hypothermic. Put him in with the patient. Same procedure. More hot water bottles, ladies,” he orders.
They tuck the dog under the blankets with the homeless man, who lifts a hand to stroke the dog’s ears, repeats: “Buddy, Buddy.”
“This is why he was out in it – no shelters will let him in with the dog – and if he surrenders to Animal Control, he’ll never get the dog back. Won’t be able to take it into the hospital either.”
***
They hold vigil late into the night – watch the snow come down, reheat the compresses, drink cup after cup of tea and coffee and hot chocolate.
They learn the man’s name – Owen – and learn that he and Buddy have only been out on the street for a few months. A lost job, a missed paycheck, too many pills taken for an old back injury, a too-easy slide into no hope.
They call off the ambulance – Bill vouching for the patient’s stability.
And just an hour before dawn, they disperse – to the bathrooms to freshen up, to private corners to make phone calls or doze.
Everybody has forgotten about watching Penny, and she wanders up to the catwalk alone. She looks up. The greenhouse glass is impermeable black – the snow, if it is still falling, is hidden by the dark. She looks down and sees Owen and Buddy by the reflecting pool.
A perfect slice out of time – a man, his clothes grimed and faded colorless, his hand chapped and red against the furred head. The dog’s tongue hanging out, bright pink as any hothouse flower.
Jenna B. Morgan’s work has appeared in Barren Magazine, Perhappened, Menacing Hedge, HeartWood, and elsewhere. She has an MFA in Fiction from George Mason University and currently teaches at a community college outside Nashville, Tennessee. Find her on Twitter and Instagram @byjennabmorgan.