CivilWarLand in Bad Decline

The collection’s title story takes place in a theme park, CivilWarLand. The story’s unnamed male protagonist, a yes-man to the park’s owner, is showing the park’s “transplanted Eerie Canal Lock”(3) to a potential investor, Mr. Haberstrom. Haberstrom is the “founder of Burn’n’Learn,” which is “national” and has “a fully-stocked library on the premises and as you tan you can call out the name of any book you want to these high-school girls on roller skates” (3). Haberstrom is “hot to spend to spend some reflective moments at the Canal because his -great-grandfather was a barge guider way back when who got killed by a donkey” (4). However, area gangs have defaced the theme park’s Eerie Canal Lock, and Haberstrom storms off, unwilling to invest.

Alone, the protagonist considers quitting but knows he can’t; the resumés he’s sent out have brought nothing, and the protagonist thinks this is due to being at his current position—that of Verisimilitude Inspector for the park—for nine years. He considers “his car payment” and his sons, Marcus and Howie, and “how much [they] love the little playhouse [the protagonist] is still paying off,” so the protagonist decides to “eat [his] pride and sit tight” (4).