Interloper

By Kirsten Leggett

When you called me that Saturday morning, to see if I was home, could you come and visit, I sensed something was amiss.

There was a foreign melody intermingled with your words, a forced type of joyfulness that was not you. It was an interloper somewhere on the line, dancing the tango with truth.

Where did you go that morning?

Somewhere on the knife edge of fear and disbelief, the words tumbled out while I planted the seedlings in my garden. The word remission replaced with relapse, as seamless as pulling a weed and planting a new seed in its place.