The Orb

By Aayushmaan Malviya

There's no telling how much time it will take for us to escape the lost woods, it's getting darker by second. The stars seem like prowling wolves especially when they are sparsely covered by tall pines, a full moon illuminated the dark hours. Our bus was nowhere to be seen, as we had lost track of time finding our way out, we had also lost our way in. This is one of the reasons why we always suggested the school to increase staff salary, the bus driver took a revenge, a tricky one indeed. We were somewhere in the middle of nowhere. I was stressed out, first a long day at school with teachers constantly keeping my ears busy, and now this. Mrs, Jones would get to know what it feels like in her physics class with her infamous broken british accent, lost and scared, as she boarded the same bus we did. Thankfully, Sanjay had a candle, we lit it up, placed it on a rock, and decided to rest for a while. Until, we heard someone scream, as it was very obvious, other than the 40 of us, who else could have been there? and it was very tough to keep track of everyone. So we ran to the eye of the tornado, apparently, it was Mrs. Jones, she was perfectly fine, we were all infuriated by her duplicity. She just wanted attention, "Stay by my side or you'll lose yourselves to the wolves." Honestly, if she would have kept blabbering nonsense, she would have bigger problems than the wolves. The night grew deeper as we kept talking, fireflies were our companions during this little and nice walk that we were a part of with an empty stomach and a potnetial threat of a Sabretooth attacking us. None had the inkling of our way home. At one point, we just halted, altogether. Sanjay had more candles, so we lit it up, cleaned some spots for ourselves and dozed off. It was pretty brave but wat else could we have possibly done? While everyone else drained out all of their stress by a good night sleep, I was still up, my groaning stomach ordered me antithetically. I saw an orb at that point of time, I just thought of it as a star of some sorts and ignored it, but it kept piercing my eyes. I reported this to Sanjay, a fellow insomniac, who could accompany me to solve this mystery. We followed the light altogether, for an instance it felt like our bodies were disconnected from out brain, we just marched on, until the Sun broke the darkness. The orb vanished into thin air. We had the entire city right in front of us, magnificently reflecting the sunlight giving us the most enormous view as we went down the hilltop and found our ways back home, our houses rejoiced, my heart felt heavy as I had finally found my way home, until a beamingvoice of a reporter shrilled my ears. I ran straight towards the TV, "38 bodies cadavers found in the hills, lying dead, most probably eaten by a pack of wolves. It heaved my heart, I knew the bodies, I was sitting with them in an AC bus some 12-14 hours ago, but I couldn't remember anything about that night, especially, the Orb.

By Aayushmaan Malviya