Colony of the Sunflower People

== Part One ==
The grass isn’t always greener on the other side. Sometimes, it’s red. Or, at least pink. The Mingo Man taught me that.
The man, dare I call him the gentleman, standing on my front porch was holding a single, rusted penny and beaming pleasantly at me through the crack I had made with my face between the wall and the door. I wasn’t opening it any further than that.
“What is it?” I said. My voice was gruff and part of me felt bad for starting off on the wrong foot, but I felt it necessary with these kinds of people. He was probably a Mormon, and personally, I didn’t want to start out on any footing with one of those.
The man glanced at the tiny coin and then back over to me, “It’s a penny,” he said, and his smile grew ever-so wider, “a 1993, to be exact, but I don’t believe that was the year when you deposited it into the pond just beyond the playground at the North Aspen Park and Recreation Center. No…that was in 1999, correct?”
“What?”
“1999,” he reiterated, holding the penny higher, “that’s when you threw this into the pond at the North Aspen Park — not the one at the front entrance but the one just behind the treeline surrounding the playground. Ring any bells?”
My mouth hung open and I could taste the man’s cologne on my tongue. I shook my head and lied.
“Welp, that’s unfortunate,” he said, outstretching the coin, “I wanted to know what you wished for.”
I didn’t accept the penny, “What wish?”
The man’s smile lowered, but only slightly, his chest rising and falling but no breath jetting from his nostrils, “The wish you made when you deposited this coin into the pond at the North Aspen Park in the April of 1999.”
I shrugged and couldn’t help but chuckle, “That was over twenty years ago man,” I said, scratching my neck and pointing to the penny, “and how the hell’d you even get that? That rec center was bulldozed when I was fifteen.”
“So, you do remember it?” he said, and his smile, somehow, stretched even wider. I thought his face might split in two, so I admitted my lie to avoid looking at that grin. The man’s face returned to a puckered, questioning look, and he restated his question.
“What did you wish for, Mr. Demarcus?”
I should’ve asked him how on God’s green earth he knew my name, but in my brain, there was something like an old movie reeling in my mind’s eye. The star of it was my late mother, and the cameraman was me. We were at the old North Aspen Park. I was on the playground and in my peripheral, I could make out Mom, sitting under the shelter where, at one time, no doubt, I had a birthday party, complete with one of those coolers filled with ice and sodas and bottled waters. She was wearing those big, bug-eyed sunglasses like she always did, and was smoking a cigarette. Times were different back then — they were simpler and life seemed brighter. Maybe that’s just the way the world looks through the eyes of a child.
The man streaking naked through the treeline was an image that a child’s eyes should never see, and yet somehow mine did. It was part of a memory I must’ve forgotten or suppressed, not the kind you want to remember from your youth but the one that creeps back to you when memories knock at your door.
It wasn’t him, though. That was the first thought that brought me out of my daydream, whether or not the stranger on my porch was the streaker from my childhood. While they were both run-of-the-mill, brunette, white men, this one was plump like a pear, while the streaker was thin and gaunt, not to mention this guy was clothed. He was wearing a button-down pink shirt like he had just left a Sunday service, yet clearly, he hadn’t — the shirt was so faded that it was practically white, and parts of it were stained with soil and dirt. Over his shoulder, I could make out an old rust bucket of a pickup truck, complete with a wooden bed filled with lawn gnomes, statues of the Virgin Mary, and plastic, pink flamingos. I suppose the latter is where my daughter gave the man the nickname of ‘The Mingo Man’, but we’ll get to her in a bit.
With such an array of oddities, I couldn’t quite predict whether the man was about to ask me about ‘accepting Jesus’, mowing my lawn, or investing my thirty-year-old penny into his Ponzi scheme. Given his demeanor and the statue of Mary, I assumed the former, yet that didn’t explain the gnomes, the flamingos, or the coin. It did explain, however, why, despite everything else in that truck of his, there was no mower or weedwhacker. And whether or not he was a gospeler or gardener, neither explained the copper nor his question about my ‘wish’.
“I dunno,” I finally answered, scratching my neck again and wondering how long I was lost in thought for, “I probably wished for baseball cards.”
“Base-ball cards?” the man said, chewing on the words as if they were a foreign concept to him.
“Yeah, y’know, like Sammy Sosa? Bo Porter? I was a huge Cubs fan-“
“Sorry, Mr. Demarcus,” he said, cutting me off, “I’m not very familiar with base-ball, as you call it.”
I smirked, “Well, to be honest, I’m not familiar with…well, whatever it is you’re trying to do. But I’m not interested,” I said, pushing the penny in his hand back toward him.
“Oh, no, no, no,” he said, wagging his head, “you’ve got it all wrong, Mr. Demarcus-“
“See, like that,” I said, this time cutting him off, “how do you know my name?”
He continued to beam at me, but now it was not with his teeth, “I know a lot more about you than your name, Mr. Demarcus.”
“Such as?”
“Such as how your mother died later that year — 1999. She was ill, wasn’t she — for a good three years before you gave us this?” he rhetorically asked, holding up the penny once again.
“Whose us?” I asked back, only I didn’t know the answer to mine. I supposed that question lent him a nice segway into his little spiel, which it did.
“Well, I suppose we’re wish granters,” he said, “times are tough for everyone these days, and the least we could do is help out our fellow man and his…little one.” His gesture behind my leg caused me to realize that I wasn’t alone. Lily, my daughter, was standing just behind me, her face poking out from between my knee and the door. I softly pulled her back with my hand.
“We’re not interested,” I said, one last time. I was firm.
The man sighed, “Y’know, Mr. Demarcus, if my mother were dying, and I made a wish…I’d remember that wish pretty crystal clear.”
I swallowed and held back my daughter, “I have everything I need right here. Thanks.”
The man grinned and clicked, kneeling down as if he were about to propose on cue and locking a pair of soft eyes onto my daughter. Her face was half tucked into my leg, but she was still observing him with a single, wandering eye, just as she always would with strangers. She was keen — a trait she picked up from me and definitely not her mother.
“What’s your name, little lady?” His voice was softer now and higher pitched. I could feel my daughter rubbing her head on me, back and forth, trying to decide whether or not to speak to him. Finally, she did:
“Lily.”
The man lit up, “Lily,” he said, “what a beautiful name.” He looked from her to me, as if asking for approval to continue, and I nodded, uncomfortable as I was. He continued, “Lily, do you know what Sunday is?”
She nodded.
“What is it?” he hushed.
“Easter.”
“That’s right,” he said, “Easter Sunday. Do you know who comes on Easter Sunday?”
Lilly nodded again, though it was a gesture less unsure than before, “Jesus?”
Of course, she’d say Jesus. No doubt my ex-wife was filling her head with all sorts of religious propaganda, and now my daughter was giving this stranger on my porch the fuel he needed for his hellfire speech.
Instead, however, he laughed, “Well, I suppose him, too. But…anyone else?”
She thought about it, and went with her second answer, “the Easter Bunny?”
“That’s right,” he said again, “and what does the Easter Bunny do?”
“Lay eggs?” she said, quicker with her answer. Again, the man laughed.
“I suppose so,” he said, “but did you know, that for as magical as he is, he can’t lay all those eggs on his own?”
“Really?” my daughter’s little voice groaned.
The man nodded and reached into his back pocket, pulling out a small, plastic egg and shaking it. Something inside rattled around like a baby toy.
“Lily…do you want to help the Easter Bunny hide an egg?” She nodded enthusiastically against my leg, and the man handed her the hollow, purple hunk. “Now, listen Lily — that’s not just an egg…it’s a magic egg.”
My daughter perked up at the word and slowly unraveled from me, forcing me to press against her tighter.
“What you do is: take that egg, don’t open it, but bury it…in the ground. Your daddy can help you,” he said with an upward wink at me. “Then, on Sunday morning, something magical will rise out of the ground.”
My daughter shook the little egg and looked up at me, and then at the man, “Like Jesus?”
He smiled with a chuckle, “Just like Him.”
My daughter cupped the egg close to her chest and the man stood back up and gave me a friendly nod, handing over the penny again. That time, I took it.
“If you think of that wish, Mr. Demarcus…you know where to go.”
“I do?”
He nodded and turned on his heel, trotting back down the front porch before stopping and looking back over his shoulder, “A lot can happen in three days,” he said, and I watched as he hopped into that truck of his and rumbled the engine to a start.
“Who was the Mingo Man?” said my daughter from behind me. I turned to look at her with a puzzled look, but the sound of the rusty bucket roaring down the street stole my attention. I watched blankly as the truck disappeared over the hill at the end of the street, and my eyes panned across the neighborhood until they met with the plastic, pink flamingo beside my mailbox.
I wasn’t sure of which sight was more alarming at that point: the fact that that pink-wearing weirdo left a tacky, lawn ornament on my property, or that the rest of my neighbors had one, too.
== Part 2 (Coming Soon) ==
Category:MakRalston
Category:Weird