A Fly in the Ointment

A traveling patent-medicine show—equal parts carnival barker’s bravado and faith-healer’s fraud—pulls into a nameless dust-blown town where the air itself tastes of rusted promises and last-chance dreams. Lucille Rubey’s sharp-tongued ingenue, equal parts flapper and flame-thrower, is the headline attraction, promising miracles in cobalt bottles while secretly nursing a corrosive yearning to torch the entire charade. Neal Burns’s carny kingpin, all toothy grin and pocket-watch hypnosis, juggles bottles of colored water and the affections of every rube he can fleece, yet his smile fractures whenever the kerosene lamps throw shadows that look like the life he fled. Between the medicine wagon’s peeling gilt and the tent’s moth-chewed canvas, a single fly—yes, an actual insect—buzzes like a metronome of cosmic contempt, alighting on every lie just long enough to remind us how quickly grand illusions rot. One swat too many and the whole enterprise unspools: confessions hiss out like steam from a cracked radiator, counterfeit elixirs spill into the sawdust, and the troupe scatters under a sky bruised by searchlights and the town’s collective shame. Yet the fly keeps circling, triumphant, stitching together the tatters of a narrative that refuses to resolve, leaving only the echo of Rubey’s smoky laugh and the faint smell of turpentine where dreams once stood.