Tricia noticed a Fast Forward button on the remote, which is pretty much a standard as far as remotes go, but it looked out of place on a remote where most of the buttons made physical adjustments to one's body. She pressed it, making sure it struck her reflection in the mirror.
Suddenly the world became a blur. Images of school, driving on the road, and rooms in her house whizzed by. She saw faces she recognized, friends from school in their graduation robes, then faces she'd never seen before, rooms she'd never been in, and several glimpses of a college campus. Then before she knew it, more graduation robes appeared on everyone around her, followed by a brief show of most of her family smiling at her--though her father was noticeably absent--and then a big city, and a small apartment. She pushed Stop and took a series of heavy breaths. Her life had literally flashed before her eyes.
She was alone once again, but now she was standing in a small apartment with a window overlooking a city. Some of the things in her room she recognized, most she didn't, but she was sure she saw most of them in those brief flashes. As she tried to recall everything she had seen, the memories manifested themselves in her mind, growing clearer the more she concentrated on them. She remembered both her high school and college graduations, all of the friends she had said goodbye to and all the new friends she had gained. She remembered the cold night her mother phoned her about a fatal car accident involving her father. The look of his corpse in the casket at the funeral.
The body in her mirror was more mature. A 24-year-old woman, a couple years out of college, working as a waitress in a restaurant down the street and shopping around for a position in fashion design. She had aged--no, lived--six years in all of ten seconds.
Out the window she noticed a bird hovering in mid-air. It looked frozen in time. Tricia pressed Play on the remote and it flew off. She began to hear the sounds of cars on the street several stories below, and a breeze coming through her window began to cause her curtains to sway.
What new life was she about to experience? How many more possibilities lay in store? She grasped the remote tightly as the reality of her world became more clear than ever.