Sand Witches

A sun-scorched fever-dream unspools across nameless dunes where three stranded vaudevillians—Charlotte Merriam’s sphinx-like contortionist, George George’s vainglorious strongman, Vera Steadman’s languid ingénue—trade greasepaint for sand-grit after their jalopy coughs its last drop of radiator water. They blunder into a mirage that behaves like a cabaret: cracked marble proscenium arches rise from the dust, velvet curtains stitched from night skies sweep open to reveal an audience of hyenas wearing bowties. Every applauding beast morphs into Neal Burns’ shape-shifting promoter, a carny Mephistopheles who promises oasis water in exchange for increasingly baroque performances. Merriam folds herself into human origami; George tears phonebooks that do not exist; Steadman sings lullabies to her own echo. Each act costs a memory; each clap drains a pint of their future. When dawn arrives like a guillotine, the proscenium dissolves into a bleached skull the size of a cathedral. Inside its cranial hollow, drawers full of wind-up sandwiches—PB&J limbs twitching—offer the only sustenance. The trio feast, only to notice their own skin turning bread-crust gold. Burns reappears as a maître d’, tallying their transformation in a ledger of breadcrumbs. The final curtain is the desert itself folding in half, swallowing audience and performers into a sandwich of infinite layers: every mouthful a memory, every swallow a forgotten name, the desert forever burping vaudeville tunes carried on thermals of laughter that sound suspiciously like sobbing.