Flash Forward
by Avery Sam
Copyright Information
Flash Forward
by Avery Sam
© 2026 Avery Sam
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Author: Avery Sam
Contact details: averysam.parachute371@passinbox.com
Book cover, illustration: Avery Sam
Editing, proofreading: Avery Sam
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Table of Contents
Where Dreams Go to Die
Despite its name, the Sunshine Palms Court apartment complex was where dreams go to die.
Which suited me just fine, as I was in a really bad place when I moved in there. Just ten years earlier, I’d been on top of the world. I’d graduated from the University of Central Florida with a degree in computer science, and me and my best friend Jason had just launched our start-up. Best of all, I’d met Jenny, and a year later, we were married, and our company's app was valued at $50 million dollars.
That’s the part everyone likes to hear about, and quite frankly, it’s the only part I really like to think about. The rest is just too depressing, you know?
Besides, there’s nothing exciting or glamorous about your best friend scheming with investors to exclude you from the company or coming home to find your wife in bed with her therapist because you were putting in too many hours at the office. And the long slide into alcoholism and an addiction to junk food is just pathetic.
So yeah, I wasn’t exactly feeling too optimistic when I moved into the Sunshine Palms Court complex, with its grotty little apartments that stank of swamp water and old cigarette smoke, tiles peeling off the walls all over the place, and a courtyard with a swimming pool that was full of rotting leaves.
I think what got me the most, though, was all my neighbors. It’s one thing to look in the mirror and realize you’re failing the game of life, but it’s quite another thing to see you’re surrounded by other middle aged losers.
For instance, there was one guy at the end who had what looked like a pretty nice Cadillac. But if you got close to it, you could see it was crammed full of stuff to the point where the back end was sagging down. At first, I thought maybe he was shifting stolen merchandise, but over time, I realized he was just a hoarder, using his car to store his crap because the apartment was a rental.
Easily 90% of the residents were men about my age, some a bit older, but all with the sallow, grim look of people trying to hang on after the gravy train had long since left the station. Some guys tried to disguise it with flashy watches and shiny shoes, but they were still coming home to a six-by-four box where the noise from the highway only died down around two o’clock in the morning.
As for me, I spent my time using the tattered remains of my contacts to try and build out my tech consulting business. The internet was just starting to be a thing then, but not to the point of video calls, so expanding into emails and interactive websites did give me a bit of an advantage.
Nonetheless, there were plenty of fruitless days where I spent hours on the phone trying to sound upbeat and confident when all I could really think about was heating up a frozen meal and settling in with some brews to watch the game on TV.
In a sorry sort of way, I guess I was one of the more successful residents of Sunshine Palms Court. Some guys got hauled off in the middle of the night to the accompaniment of flashing red and blue lights. Others had to slink off in the early hours of the morning, carrying their belongings in trash bags after they could no longer make the rent.
After just six months, I was already an old-timer. It soon got to the point where I could see a newcomer arrive, one sweaty hand clutching onto the key fob as they made their way down the landing, and I’d know right away if they were going to make it or not.
I’d been living in that dump for about a year when Mike moved in next door. I’d actually been out at a successful face-to-face meeting with a client that day, but I heard him through the thin adjoining wall of our apartments. A couple of days later, I saw him outside and gave him a nod hello.
I wouldn’t say we were best friends or anything, but we struck up an acquaintance probably because we were coming from similar situations. Like me, Mike had once owned a successful business, although he’d been in retail logistics rather than tech.
He was also divorced, although his separation sounded a lot more bitter than my own. I’d been too heartbroken and full of self-pity to really want to fight Jenny, and anyway, there weren’t exactly a lot of assets to contest. Mike, however, had a kid, and hearing him talk about having to share custody with his ex really struck me to the quick.
You didn’t really see too many kids around Sunshine Palms Court, and for good reason. The apartments were all of the one-bedroom type, but perhaps most importantly, no one with an ounce of self-respect would want their children to see how far they’d fallen by visiting them in a place like that.
Of course, I had wanted to have kids with Jenny. We talked about it several times when we were dating, but she kept telling me to wait until we could provide them a “a proper future.”
Obviously, that never happened, so I guess my one consolation for being a broke, divorced bachelor is that I haven’t let down my own flesh and blood. Jenny resented me enough as it was, thank you very much, despite the fact that she had gone on to marry some tech mogul and was now living in Coral Gables.
So yeah, I felt sorry for Mike, and so a couple times a month when our schedules permitted it, we’d drag out some plastic chairs and sit in front of our apartments on the landing and share a beer or two. I never asked him too many details about work, but I know he was doing a lot of driving around, often leaving in the morning and not coming back home until late.
This is probably going to sound selfish, but the fact that he was about a decade older than me gave me the motivation to get out there and hustle even on days when I felt like sleeping in.
I could see the lines on his face, and the thought of still being at Sunshine Palms Court for another ten years gave me the willies. So yeah, although I would never mention it to him of course, there were times when I said no to another beer and went to bed instead because I didn’t want to end up like Mike.
Now, without trying to be rude or disrespectful, most of the women I saw in the complex tended to be on the rougher side. Maybe in the dim haze of neon lights at 2:00 in the morning, one could overlook their flaws, but watching them teeter off on their heels in broad daylight gave me more than one shock to the nervous system. All I’ll say is that there’s a limit to what make-up can do.
There were a few female residents at Sunshine Palms Court, and for some reason, they were all chain smokers, mostly in their 50s or early 60s, who preferred to wear velour track suits or else brightly patterned dresses. Smoking inside the apartments was forbidden, so they would cluster around these benches near the broken pool. Unlike the guys, they seemed more resigned to their fate, if that makes sense.
I never really spent much time talking to them, although I’m not sure why. Yet I got the impression that none of them were working, surviving instead on alimony payments or government assistance or both. They’d chit-chat out there on the benches in the morning and then sometimes go for a stroll around the block, and that’s about all I’d see of them. As far as I know, none of them ever hooked up with any of the male residents.
The reason I’m mentioning all this is so you’ll understand how thunderstruck I was when Katie showed up. I only caught a glimpse of her up on the second floor as I was bringing in my clothes from the laundry room, but it was enough to stop me dead in my tracks. In that decaying, musty old complex, she was a breath of fresh air with long, glossy hair, green eyes, and a pep in her step that almost made me weep.
I got an even bigger surprise when I heard her talking to Mike through our adjoining wall later that evening. I couldn’t make out the words or anything, but that high, cheerful note was so out of place that I just knew it had to be her.
A couple of days later, I ran into Mike on the landing, and he told me that Katie was his daughter, coming to live with him for a while after some kind of unspecified “trouble” with his ex-wife.
That certainly got me intrigued, but when I asked him if he wanted to hang out later, he declined, saying he had some kind of contract paperwork he had to get finished or something like that.
As such, it was a few more days before I got my first really good look at the young woman who would completely transform my life.
What Neighbors Are for
One of my many vices back in those days was puffing on a cigarette, particularly in stressful situations.
After a gig fell through that I’d really been counting on or getting another hard 'no' on the phone, I'd grab my smokes and head out to the rear balcony of my apartment. It was pretty small, but it had a fairly nice view, and smoking and putting my feet up on the railing for a few minutes was usually enough to relax me.
Because of the way the apartment complex was built, all the balconies were right next to one another with maybe a gap of an inch or two between them. On my balcony, I had a single plastic chair as well as an ashtray that I kept on the windowsill of my tiny kitchen. Mike, on the other hand, had a small wooden bench on his, although I’d never seen him out there before.
Fuming at the way my last call had ended, I was halfway through lighting my cigarette when I noticed Katie sitting on the bench on Mike’s balcony. She had her knees drawn up and was intensely focused on her phone, which allowed me to let my gaze linger on her for a bit. It was immediately apparent that she was quite attractive, with a petite frame, long hair, and glossy hair that went all the way to her waist.
It was a bit awkward for me, standing there just a few feet away from her and neither of us saying anything. But we hadn’t been introduced, so she didn’t know me from Adam, and it felt rude to strike up a conversation.
As such, I smoked my cigarette, while occasionally taking a few sidelong glances over at her. If I hadn’t known she was Mike’s daughter, I never would’ve guessed as she had fine, delicate features without any of his rough-hewn simplicity.
From then on out, though, I kept my ears open. If I thought I heard the door to the balcony at his apartment slide open, I’d go to the far end of my window and look to see if it was Katie out there. If she was, I’d suddenly find myself in urgent need of a smoke.
Yet we still never made eye contact even once as she always had her head buried in that phone of hers. Nonetheless, standing a few feet away from an attractive young person who hadn’t yet been crushed down by life soon became the highlight of my day.
It wasn’t until a couple of weeks later that Mike knocked on my door one evening and asked if I was in the mood to drink a beer. As usual, I took my plastic chair outside on the landing to watch as the sun slipped over the horizon. For a while, we said nothing other than perhaps some light chit-chat about the weather, but then the subject of Katie finally came up.
“I gotta tell ya, man. Raising a daughter in this day and age is a tough row to hoe,” said Mike, leaning back in his chair.
“I hear ya,” I said, pausing to take a sip of my beer.
“Personally? I blame that goddamn social media,” said Mike. “It pressures girls to do things they ought not to be doing.”
“Yep,” I said, my mind racing as I tried to figure out what, specifically, he was referring to.
“Let me ask you a question,” said Mike, cracking open a second beer. “You ever heard of this online place called Glam Girls?”
“Um, do they sell make-up or something?” I said.
“Nah, I wish,” said Mike with a chuckle. “It’s this website where... hell, I don’t know how to put it. But some women put their photos there, and other people pay money to look at ’em even though it’s supposed to be, like, a website for models.”
“You mean like Facebook?” I said, hazarding a guess.
“No, come on, man. Facebook is free,” said Mike, shaking his head.
“Oh yeah, right,” I said.
“This Glam Girls thing involves people paying money, as in real money, to look at photographs and sometimes even videos of women,” said Mike with a scowl.
“I don’t get it,” I said. “Why would anyone pay money to look at pictures?”
“Why do you think?” said Mike, casting me a sidelong glance.
“Oh...” I said as it suddenly hit me what he was talking about. “You mean like... nudie pics and that?”
“Yeah,” said Mike, letting out a mournful sigh. “They say it ain’t pornography, but it’s pretty damned close in my opinion.”
“Yikes,” I said. “I don’t mess with any of that. I mean, I tried one time, but it was all freaky shit with midgets and stuff, and it gave me the willies. No thank you, you know what I mean?”
“I hear ya,” said Mike, pausing to take a big gulp of beer. “But that’s why Katie’s come to live with me.”
“Huh?” I said.
“Her mother caught her posting pictures on that damned website,” said Mike.
“Jesus!” I spluttered. “Oh man, that’s not good.”
“Yeah, tell me about it,” said Mike. “The fact that any freakazoid with an internet connection can look at my little girl makes me want to find the guy who runs that website and snap his neck.”
“Oof, yeah, I feel you,” I said, even as all kinds of lurid thoughts began whirling through my mind.
“I fucking told Linda not to let her have her own phone,” said Mike. “But she didn’t listen, did she? And now my baby girl is halfway to becoming a stripper.”
“Yikes,” I said.
“When I confronted Katie about it, she said all the girls at her school were doing it,” said Mike with a snort of derision. “As if that makes it okay.”
“I hear you,” I said.
“Anyway, I made her take down all that shit, but the damage is done, you know?” said Mike, crumpling his empty beer can and tossing it aside. “Apparently, some boys at school were passing around pictures of her. What a fucking mess.”
“Damn,” I said, even as part of me was inflamed with curiosity to see those pictures.
“So yeah, she’s gonna be bunking with me for a while, at least until all this settles down,” said Mike, turning to give me an intense look. “Then hopefully, we can put all this behind us.”
“Sounds like a plan,” I said, his gaze making me a bit nervous.
“Listen, I know you work from home sometimes,” said Mike. “So if you could, you know, kind of keep an eye on her, I’d really appreciate it.”
“Um, I guess so, sure,” I said.
“Cool, thanks. Hey, you want to hear the most fucked up part?” said Mike, not bothering to wait for an answer. “Katie told me she was making a thousand bucks a month doing that nasty business.”
“Woah,” I said. “That’s a lot.”
“Damn right,” said Mike with a little chuckle, helping himself to another beer. “Hell, when I was her age, I was loading trucks with my cousins out at this depot my uncle owned. Bringing home 100 bucks a week felt like a small fortune.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“I used that money to save up to buy my first car,” said Mike. “I was real proud of that thing, too, you know? Did all the maintenance on it myself. But never in a million years would I have guessed showing off a little skin would make three times the money.”
“The internet’s changed everything,” I said with a nod as I gulped down the last of my beer. “That’s for sure.”
“The whole damn world’s turned upside down,” said Mike. “Anyway, if you see any guys sniffing around here who don’t belong, let me know, yeah?”
“Sure. Of course, of course,” I said.
“I guess the one piece of good news out of all this is that Katie never got her driver’s license,” said Mike with a rueful chuckle. “Boy, in my day, I was roaming around all over town. Ain’t no way you could’ve kept me grounded, not when there were cute girls to flirt with at the drive-in restaurant. You have those where you grew up?”
“Um, not so much, no,” I said. “That was a bit before my time. It was more about the mall for me. That’s where everyone went to go hang out.”
“Oh yeah, the mall,” said Mike, nodding. “Well, I don’t think I need to worry about Katie going to the mall. Last time I was there, it was just old ladies doing power walks around the upper level and half the shops were out of business.”
“Yeah, kids don’t go to the mall anymore these days,” I said, as if I were some kind of expert or something.
“Anyway, some time with her old man will do her good,” said Mike. “Soon as I get these contracts sorted out, maybe I’ll take her fishing. She isn’t the outdoorsy type, but damnit, it's better than staring at a damn phone all day.”
“I hear you,” I said. “So, um, I’m guessing that you took her phone away, right?”
“Hell yeah,” said Mike with a grin. “Soon as she got in the car, I made her hand it over, and then I flung that fucker out the window, hehe. She was crying like someone stole her puppy or something, but she’ll get over it.”
“Ah, yeah,” I said, now incredibly confused because I had definitely seen her ...