She had no way of knowing how long she had been here, just that it seemed to have been over a year.

In the asylum, Time liked to play wicked games.

Time is a vagrant. It travels through our lives, doing its best to make an impact by defining our days – our lives, chopping them up into little increments for us to measure their passing. It drags along with it a large black bag. A bin liner of the sort unavailable in your usual supermarkets or corner shops. It has the peculiar property of being able to hold all sorts of nothings.

'Nothing' can relate to so much, but in this case, it refers to seconds. Minutes. Hours and so on. Those things that we call time but are actually constructs of our own minds. Divisions to make the passing of the days meaningful. An increment here and there for events to be put against and, in doing so, measure their extent.

Time has no home. No substance that we are aware of, though that doesn't mean doesn't exist. Time watches us and laughs. We put such importance in something we can't see or touch, it can't help but be amused. We give it a pedestal to stand upon and lament how little control we have over it. To Time, these lamentations are the mutterings of loons. As insubstantial as it is, we desire to possess it. To lengthen and shorten it as we see fit. No matter how much effort we put into trying to, we are, and always will be, unsuccessful.

How can we catch something that doesn't exist? How can we manage something that, by our own missives, manages us?

Wicked games. Yes. Time enjoys those immensely.

If the bag were to be opened and we could see it and its contents, we would witness the implements of those games. Snippets of seconds or minutes stolen from throughout the day, giving the impression, for example, evening had arrived far sooner than expected and the work day was over. We'd be thankful. Here in the asylum, where our only employment consisted of fighting our demons (mental and staff), evening meant a delicious, filling meal of slop, a potential movie or game night, drugs and sleep. The interim between breakfast and then was a strained blur of mindlessness. A blur in that it merged into one, not passed so fast you couldn't discern the details.

Time steals time when we're not looking, filling its bag and shortening our day. How nice?

Indeed.

But, when we are doing things we love, outside of an asylum's straitjackets, those snatched moments are sorely missed. An evening's premature arrival is cursed. The flashed by day is lamented.

And Time laughs.

And the opposite is also true. In Time's bag are all those off cuts. Cutting the cloth of the day to suit its plan or, in the absence of an actual plan, its whim. Like a farmer casting feed for their hens, so Time casts those pieces about in a haphazard sprinkling of "Is that all the time is? I thought it was later!" Hours are stuffed with excess minutes, making them waddle through the day, overweight and slow and teetering on the edge of collapse.

And, oh, how Time laughs.

Hence, I could feel her pain. She suffered more than most, definitely more than I, so as much as the days could drag for me, they must have been interminable for her.

Nadia Epsilion. I liked her surname and had asked her where it was from, particularly with its proximity to a certain Greek letter. She had no idea. It was her name and she accepted it without any feelings either way. In my case, I'd discarded my surname some time before. It was a tie to my past, one that involved my parents and my dead sister.

Joy, my sister, had escaped in the most ultimate of ways. I'd ended up in an asylum with a trail of death behind me.

Nadia's sense of time was more tuned than most. She usually had a perfect sense of the hour, minute and second of the day and would astound us with her accuracy. It was as if her heart was an atomic clock, with an average beat of once per second, the upper limit of bradycardia, ticking away with unnerving precision. It was a party trick that never lost its fascination, and one she would demonstrate whenever asked.

But, she hated it.

She told me once after ensuring my secrecy. Keeping my mouth shut was something I had no issue with. I knew so many things about so many people because they all knew they could trust me.

"It's such a weight," she said.

It was a Friday evening. Nadia had just been asked, and had given, the time. Six thirty seven and fourteen seconds, she'd answered. She was, of course, correct and Edina, the requestor, had gone away happy, something Edina seldom was. Nadia had sat beside me and we'd had the small talk people with nothing to fill their days engaged in. There was no introduction. No lead in. No finesse. Just straight in.

"It's such a weight."

"What is?" I'd asked.

"This time thing," she said. "Everyone asking me. Me knowing. It weighs heavy on me."

"How so? They all think it's pretty cool."

I indicated the room with a sweep of my hand, taking in both staff and residents. They were all impressed with her gift, and I included myself in that.

"I know. Everyone does. Even before I came here, people would be constantly asking. An ex girlfriend once asked about forty times in an hour. She threw the question at me over and over, and I answered every time. It was painful."

"It sounds it, actually. You must get bored."

"Oh, I do, but I mean it's actually painful."

I frowned. How could telling the time, even over and over, hurt?

"What do you mean?"

Then she told me. It was Nadia who explained Time in the terms I mentioned above. She described it as a particularly spiteful sort that took pleasure in the confusion of others. She could, she said, see into that black bag. It was depthless, though its outer surface contradicted that. Crammed within were the pieces that made up our days. Our lives. They weren't simply markings on a clock face. They were parts of us. Whether seconds or more, they were shavings of our souls.

"Our souls? Isn't that a little..."

"Melodramatic?"

I nodded.

"Well, yes."

"I wish that was the case. But it's not. I'm telling you, Sin, Time doesn't just steal our minutes, it takes our... our... whispers."

"Whispers? You mean it listens in on us when...?"

"No," she interrupted impatiently. "Not that sort of whispers. I don't know what else to call it. It's like the parts of us we don't notice. Sort of bits of our shadows that linger when she sun comes out. They're there but you can't really see them. Do you know what I mean?"

In a way, I did. I could see what she was getting at, at least. It was one of those things that made sense the less you thought about it. I didn't tell her it was a little too abstract for me, though.

"I understand," I said.

"I knew you would." She smiled. "So, I can feel it when Time steals my whispers. Not just mine, either. Everyone's."

"You can?"

"Yes."

Our conversation as interrupted by Christian wanting to know hoe many seconds it was until breakfast. Nadia told him and I saw a tear creep from the corner of her eye. She ignored it and smiled when Christian thanked her.

"I can only see forward," she told me.

It was the next day and a similar time. If someone had asked her, I would not have been surprised to discover it was the same time. This time there was no small talk. She just dropped the sentence on my head as suddenly as if she'd snipped the horse's hair that held Damocles sword. It took me a second, one of my own, I hoped, to realise what she was referring to.

"Oh?" I said, using the word to give my mind the chance to scramble her meaning together.

"Yes. I can't see back. If you asked me how long it had been since breakfast yesterday, I couldn't tell you. I can only look forward."

"Oh," I said. The same word, but a different inflection.

"Don't you think that's strange?"

I did and told her as much.

"Do you know why?"

I shook my head.

"Do you?" I asked.

Nadia didn't respond immediately. She looked at me as if she was searching for the answer in my face. There were no answers to be found there as far as I knew.

"All those whispers. They're our past, if you think about it."

I did think about it. I could see she was right, or would be if I believed her. If Time was a real entity and was stealing our 'whispers', it was time – I couldn't call it anything else – gone by. By the time Time... was this just confusing to me? By the...

Stop. Take a breath.

By the time Time used the fragments of time...

My head was hurting, but I didn't let on to Nadia. She was confiding in me and when people did that, I let them say their piece at their pace, whether I believed or understood it or not.

I nodded. It was the safest option.

"When those whispers are inserted into our days, its mixing the past and future to make a new present. I can see where they're going, but not where they're from."

Where was Doc Brown and his faithful dog Einstein when I needed them. Does anyone have a DeLorean I can borrow?

"So, you can see into the future, in a way?"

Nadia laughed loudly enough to draw looks from the others in the Recreation Room. Her laughter stuttered to a self conscious halt, but she elbowed me in my ribs. She waited for the unwanted attention to drift away again before continuing.

"No, silly," she said. "I'm not septic!"

"You mean psychic?"

"I know exactly what I mean," she sniggered.

I smiled. I couldn't help it. Even when she was dealing with the intricacies of a time vortex only Doctor Who would understand (sorry Doc), she had a devilish sense of humour.

"OK, so...?" I prompted.

"I can see where the days are extended or chopped into little pieces," she continued. "When you think a day is dragging, Time isn't just shoving in bits of the days you thought went quickly. It's using your whispers. Bender Benny's. Wey's. Even Connors'."

It sounded far fetched, of course. It couldn't be true and I wondered if Nadia was reliving a movie she'd seen once. I used to watch a lot of films, especially of that genre and I couldn't remember one quite like that myself. That didn't mean there wasn't one. If there actually wasn't, then perhaps there should be. I didn't feel the need to suggest it. She believed it, so intimating it could all be fiction wasn't the right thing to do. Certainly not something I'd do, anyway.

Something occurred to me.

"Does that mean our lives could be shortened? Or lengthened?"

"I don't know. I haven't counted it all up and, besides, who knows how long a life actually is? There's no way to know if a person dies before or after their time. Maybe it all works out equal in the end."

"Maybe Time is doing its job and it's all exactly how it should be."

"Or maybe Time is a little shit who's interfering in the proper course of things. What if its job was to keep the flow constant, but it's playing about instead?"

"I guess that would be a dangerous game."

"You guess... You gue... You... sssssssssssss..."

I have to say, I loved writing this. The starter sentence came from AnimalSaga394 (thank you!) and I've had a lot of fun with it. This is only part one of a two part chapter, so I hope you enjoyed reading it.

If you have a starter sentence you'd like me to use for a chapter, let me know!