Her Current Light
Written by Kei-Lisa Botes
Illustrated by Juno Frenzel
Light streaks across milky blue heavens, clean like washing water before the grime of ceramic bowls have stolen the clean for themselves, fragmented by wispy clouds like froths of soap over the sink of the sky. She sits hunched by the edge of the rockpool, her legs in the cool water, the surrounding foliage cast in scintillating shades of amber.
The still water dutifully reflects her weathered features: her eyes a sad summer rain, grey and watery. They are framed by mouse-brown hair falling over a crinkled face, the map of her life, every crease plowed by the inevitable advance of time.
A ripple from the far side of the pool sends the image bending into a thousand concave colours, until the image is so far warped that it may as well have originated from a whole different person. She feels the moments slide by with the ease of a wave, an instant already gone, and stares accusingly at the beams of sunlight dancing tauntingly on the water’s surface.
Those beams have stolen from her the little girl in two frail brown pigtails, still blissfully unaware of the long path that lay ahead of her.
How fast time had eroded her life, how fast light had carried her childhood into the vast expanse of space. Somewhere, travelling on the rippling sea of time, light carried her youth.
The memories flood back, the countless hours spent lost in a world where plastic toys can talk, where muddy hands folded crooked paper planes in a mouldy classroom, when the sole objective in life was to explore the beckoning arms of the tree by the window. When that world fell away, a new one rose out of its ashes, one where pain was still nonexistent, where the world became the thing that beckoned instead, its lavish arms spread out in welcome. The people she met, the people she loved, the person she fell in love with. A place in time when the world held her in an embrace. But it, too, started to crumble. The world hugged too tight, squeezing the air out of her lungs, choking her slowly through many decades. When it finally released, she was left staggering for air, the only one to come out the other side. Through it all light, veiled behind the title of time, let the old woman in so discreetly that it startled her when one day she realised that that was what she had become.
Shaking her head, she stands up, leaving droplets of water drooling down her skeletal legs.
It is easy to blame the passage of time, the cycle of light for all that she has lost.
Especially at her sprightly age, she thinks drily.
How could she resent light’s reliability in a life holding none?
Countless times she survived solely on its promise of another day, and another after that, and yet another after that, each burying the troubles of the one before.
When she and life wrote on different pages, the ink of her mind bleeding across the lines in a blubbering mess, she could count on the fresh light of dawn warming her soul, its delicate tendrils melting away the frozen worry. It only ever asked for a moment, then she gave it a whole lot more, letting its balminess soothe her willing skin, feeling its energy pass on into her very being, the marks of her strangulation erased under its radiance.
That is why she comes to this place, she realises.
To escape the old woman, to meet the young once more. To forget by remembering.
Where she can slowly watch what nothing can move faster than, its speed so unfathomable it does not seem to move at all. To hold a shaft of light between her fingers, the light holding no indication that has come from anywhere except that it may be a part of her very hand, her own body a sun, and the sun itself merely an unrelated ball in the sky that happens to have the privilege of being lighted as well. To take comfort in complicated simplicity.
A long life taught her light runs deeper than its scientific wavicle nature. Light can be expressed through actions, and so can darkness. She lived so long in the shadows, a gray area of uncertainty, where light and dark melded like the horizon and the sea, both coexisting by not existing at all. There are times when the shadows deepen, her knowledge of the dark more sure. But it only takes a simple act of kindness, a loving gesture, a caring smile, and she is reminded of the existence of light just as convincingly as if a sun has revived a night sky. It fills her, giving her a certainty that where it is, true darkness could never be. In its presence, she is sure no shadow could ever touch her. She closes her eyes, and smiles.
As the sky starts to give up on the day, the soft shades of glowing yellow coating the leaves around the pool melts into subdued stains. The water against her shins have long dried, herself long gone. The stones beside the water’s edge no longer hold any memory of her presence, once again cold in their unmoving hues of grey.
One would think she was never there.
But thousands of kilometres away, in a state no one is in a state to understand, her movements are remembered on a different kind of river, one that sets the boundaries of the Universe.
Chasing her past is her past, her future not yet in the chase.
Her life continues to unfurl in the current of light, her being shaping the current so that the edges she made, though she may no longer exist, are still recalled in the edges of time.
END
About Time to Write
Following the success of Time to Write 2024, ISEB partnered with IAPS to bring the international creative writing competition back for 2025. Time to Write was open to all schools everywhere, and asked young writers to submit short stories written in response to the theme ‘Light’.
More than 3000 pupils from schools all over the world entered the competition, with entries shortlisted collaboratively by a pool of judges using cutting-edge adaptive comparative judgement technology, in partnership with RM Compare. This resulted in a reliable, fair and accurate ranking of entries.
The top ten stories in each category were reviewed by a panel of judges, including children’s book authors, a senior researcher from the University of Winchester, heads of English from St Swithun’s School and York House School, a literary events interviewer, and a senior lecturer from Arts University Bournemouth.
To find out more about ISEB and IAPS’s Time to Write competition for schools, visit write.iseb.co.uk.
ISEB and IAPS would like to thank RM Compare; the judging panel Ali Sparkes, Naomi Anson, Dr Ellen Spencer, Marc Knight, Rebecca Fletcher, Sarah Bentley and Vincent Larkin; the talented illustrators who helped bring each story to life; sponsors Arts University Bournemouth, Oxford University Press, Scanning Pens and Team Elite; everyone involved in the shortlisting process; and, most importantly, all the young writers who took part in the Time to Write 2025 competition.
The four winning stories of Time to Write 2025
An old lady wistfully reflects on the light she once had in her life, long since stolen by time. But can she shed the darkness that has descended on her, and find a way to live her life in the light once more?
The winning story in the category for writers in Years 10 and 11 in the 2025 ISEB and IAPS Time to Write international creative writing competition.
“An ambitious, poetic and well-crafted story with real style and technique and some standout lines.” The Time to Write judging panel.
