"We must be in
Mercury retrograde, I thought. It was an
astrological condition my mom's boyfriend, Wayne, told me about, a reversal of luck, good or bad. Wayne explained it like you're on a train and when another train is passing, going in the same
direction,
it looks like it's going backward. He says
Mercury retrograde is a time when
it's impossible to judge distances. If you know when it's going to happen, you can get yourself in the right mindframe and it doesn't totally screw you up. That's how, when the trains start
sliding backward, you know which way they're really going."
Rebecca Moore, from the short story "
Smokin' Joe"