Hi @jayna

I've got a super rushed morning.
But just quickly dropping a comment now to say:

Re the title image: I went to the artist's pixabay profile, and they must have taken down that particular image. I have replaced the title image with a very similar one that conveys the same unsettling effect I wanted for this short story, and the link goes right to the source now.

Re: edits. I'm pretty sure I know the line/s you meant. I have edited them as best I can to make it less gory, while still maintaining the plot's context. If the changes I have made aren't enough, I'm not sure what I'll do, because that is a crucial plot point to set up the twist at the end.

Anyway, I shall return later when I'm less rushed to comment more fully 🙂

Continued: haha, sorry about the first part of that comment, I looked up from my computer screen this morning and realised I had to pick up my mother in 10 mins (a mad dash to the car) to give her a lift to her MRI scan. So that comment was rushed and I wanted to respond properly.

This story is painful and intense, but an incredible read. I think it's a bit like an acid trip, although I've never experienced that. But the sense that we're traveling through a place that is almost normal (the amusement park setting), yet at the same time haunting, creepy and surreal, is present throughout.

This is absolutely what I was going for; that surreal betwixt and between (and very trippy you're right) feeling of a reality gone wrong. The narrator is indeed a dark character, full of pain and unresolved issues, and as I was writing the first draft I was sort of just going for what an extreme psychotic episode might be like, then as I got further in I liked the idea of making it more magic realism, with the boundaries of reality blurred.

In the end, it really appealed to my horror writer's side to leave it wickedly unresolved so different readers might draw different conclusions. The theme park is reality and the brain on the desk is proof of this... he is still trapped in the strange psychological maze of Looshie Land, and the doctor Imogene (also his lover in Looshie Land) is in on the whole twisted experiments of the theme park's controller. Or perhaps the brain is just a continuation of John Loosh's hallucinatory episode?

Who can tell... 'insert evil laughter' 😂
Or even more frightening, is the whole of reality just a dream (or in poor John's case a surreal nightmare)?

Certainly, the story evolved through the drafting process to be more of an unsettling psychological horror than I initially meant it to be.

I know you're leaving the platform to focus on pursuing your creative goals, and I do applaud that! And I believe in you!!

Thank you, I truly appreciate that my friend, and I have been working hard on my larger project these past 4 weeks, and will continue to do so.

Thanks for taking the time to comment 👍🙂 and I hope the edits are enough to pull the story in line with the community rules. I'd already edited the sex scene in this story to make sure it wouldn't break the ink well's rules, but I missed the sentence that I think you were alluding to which was the wrong side of gore for TIW.