The Scheisskopf Gluten Company was not having a good quarter. None of the recent quarters had been good. Brayden Scheisskopf, the current president, sat in his office, at the large desk made entirely of gluten resin, and pored over the figures in the latest financial sheets that the Chief Financial Officer had emailed him. The numbers were terrible. Sales of gluten had been plummeting for years, and were now so low that even the illegal offshore shell companies were having no effect.
Brayden rubbed his face and stared at the wall of portraits, showing four generations of Scheisskopfs as they oversaw their empire of gluten. He felt their looks of disappointment. "I'm sorry," he said to them. But what could he do against the tide of history? Gluten was just not being consumed anymore. "You know how these things go," he often said to the shareholders. "First one person decides to go gluten-free, then another. Next thing you know all the restaurants have the letters 'GF' on all the items on the menu."
He opened his top drawer and took out a large bag of gluten chips. He always thought better on gluten. He chewed slowly, savoring the elasticity and springiness of the wheat-extracted protein. Why couldn't people appreciate that?
Suddenly he sat up. "That's it!" he shouted to the stern faces in the portraits.
Converting the Scheisskopf Gluten Company's gluten factory into a theme park took nearly a year and more than a few clever maneuvers in the company's accounts. But once it was done and "Glutanica" opened for the first time, the critics were silenced. No one could have anticipated the success of the theme park.
There was a gluten rollercoaster. And kids could have their picture taken with "Glutus," a giant fluffy grain of wheat, who was really two undocumented workers, one standing and working the legs and the other sitting on his shoulders and working the arms and head, and both dreaming of a better life and a parking space closer to the entrance.
There was also ride where people were strapped into a giant raft and sent down a river of gluten-extract. The substance was far thicker and bouncier than water, and the smell was not altogether unpleasant, somehow combining the odors of corn flakes and cow manure.
In the center of the theme park was a big pit of gluten where the kids could swim and play while the parents could have a few minutes of relief to play with their smartphones, and a ride where people rode on a little carts through a fairy tale castle and shown all the different ways that gluten is used around the world, with mechanical puppets singing, "Gluten glues the world together/Good in nice or stormy weather."
And there was a large chamber with long elastic bands of gluten, arranged in crisscrossing patterns and in many layers from floor to ceiling, so that kids could climb in it like spiders on a web. There was a height requirement for adults, too, although this came under some criticism as being age discriminatory, and a lawyer was able to make a name for himself by arguing at the Supreme Court that there was no rational basis why an adult could not enjoy hanging upside down from large bands of gluten as much as a child.
The park's ticket sales more than offset the loss in sales of edible gluten. Until the company was sued by Disney. Apparently, Disney had bought the rights for turning gluten into an amusement park from Michael Scheisskopf, Brayden's father, in exchange for a trip to Disney World for his whole family. Brayden remembered that trip, and although it was a shame that Glutanica had to close its doors, no one could argue that the Scheisskopf family had not gotten something valuable in return.
