Oooh. I will admit I wasn't expecting that ending but the reveal felt perfect, and what a symbol to pick for that reveal. I also like the way you handled giving Samantha some depth as a character - it's a short story, so you didn't have a lot of room, and you made it count.
My one big critique, a lot of your sentences felt the same length which is a bit jarring. To grab a paragraph from early on:
I remember the day I climbed into my piece-of-shit car and the dashboard blinked a luminous 4:00 AM. I drove into the desert. I was impatient and even excited. I added ridiculous and hopeful numbers in my head, tallying the cash I would make on this job. The stuff I could buy when I returned home. I could laugh now, what a waste. I considered rigging my piece of shit car off a cliff, just to know I’d never have to set my sorry eyes on it ever again.
You can merge some of these sentences together, and use less periods. As-is it flows a bit choppy and made me feel like the narrator was out of breath.
You said this was an old piece, though, and I'm not sure how much editing you put in before putting it up, so you may already be better at that now. Just, that's what stood out to me.
As far as the meat of your story, the organization of this between the flash backs and the intended message reminded me a lot of the old style Sci Fi I grew up with in the 80s, which is absolutely lovely. It always feels so tough to hit that same mood these days, society has changed so much.
C.E. Foxe I'm curious if people are interested in the intersection of queer and sci fi/fantasy in stories like this?
Oh yes, there's definitely a reader base for stories like this. The term I've seen most for this style is queer-normative, where characters are openly queer but it's not the focus of the story, it just is. That's what I write (turns out writing straight characters is the harder part for me who knew lol) and I've seen it popping up more often in books these days across the whole SFF genre, including military Sci Fi which is a tougher audience, even in books not marketed as queer.
All this to say, there's definitely interest, and I am thrilled.
