There was an Econo Express Hotel in Mexico City that I booked for the last three days of my trip.  At twenty-five dollars a night it was affordable, and also close to the Taxquena Station I’d be arriving at later that day.  My bus didn’t leave until noon, so I walked up to a little restaurant I’d seen the day before, a masterpiece of folk art, called Iguanas Green, for breakfast.  There were murals and masks all over the wall.  I ordered the juevos divorciados and sat back to browse through a paper I’d just picked up. 

More News.  Todos vs Todos.  Everyone against everyone.  Eight people had recently been executed in the state.  A man was killed crossing the street.  A woman was stabbed twenty-eight times.  Another man was shot by his neighbor.  A motorcyclist hit a pole.  A corpse was photographed wrapped up in a blanket.  A centerfold was threatening to show her new tattoo.  Across from me was a green and yellow devil mask, grinning as I continued to read the news.

Around eleven I returned to get my bags from the hotel, and then almost had to rush to get to the bus station, lugging my suitcase up hill, my little backpack weighing more than a dozen bowling balls by now.  The journey to Mexico City was through the mountains.  There was an interesting movie with Justin Timberlake where people use time as a commodity, and once you run out of it, your life is over, not much of a stretch, really.

When we arrived at the bus station, I decided to pay for a taxi, rather than risk all of my equipment and documentation being stolen by riding the Metro.  The Econo Express Hotel was on an ugly, busy street but was OK, a small, but fully stocked room.  Looking out of the room, at all the railings and doors, the hotel looked something like a futuristic prison, but I felt happy and safe to be confined inside it.

The rune for the day was Mannaz, or the rune of mankind.  Before leaving Cuernavaca, I’d taken a picture of it by the pool, so that was done.  I went out walking on Calzada de Tlalpan and noticed that there was a Walmart that was adjacent to the hotel that was advertising COVID tests.  Even though it had been a year and a half since the pandemic stuck terror into the heart of the human race, and even though I’d been fully vaccinated, I still needed to produce a negative COVID test to board my flight back to America.  I tried to track down where they were doing the tests and it seemed to be in the parking garage.

From there, I kept walking, now seeing where the Metro stop was.  There was a mural of an Aztec priestess, with two strips of blue paint across her face.  I passed another mural of a woman dreaming on the side of a building, beneath the real clouds.  Then there was a third of a woman nursing a baby, the Milky Way flowing out of her long, black hair, including an island of clouds and a peace sign.

Next up was the California Dancing Club.  It looked like there was dancing every Friday, Saturday, and Monday, from five until ten at night.  Lastly, there was a fourth woman, sitting in a green towel, blue and pink flowers springing from her fingertips.  It was welcoming art in a rough corridor of the city. 

What I might’ve been expecting to see was some of the violent images that feature on the front pages of the newspaper, but nothing like that was happening, at least not at the moment.  Instead, it was just people going about their daily lives, returning from work, shopping, stopping for dinner.  I looked for something to eat.