This story is about a fictional ritual where in a town, they “sacrificed” one person for the ritual. The lottery was when the people from the town each chooses a piece of paper from a box, and the person that chooses the piece of paper with the black dot is sacrificed and essentially stoned to death. This was done so they “could have good fortune and crops”. The main people in this story is Bill, and Tessie.
When they were choosing the box, Tessie was complaining because she claimed Mr. Summer, the guy doing the hosting the lottery didn’t give Bill enough time to choose the paper. (Note that Bill was choosing a paper for Tessie) Once everybody started to open up the paper, many people got blank so they were fine. However when it got to Tessie, Tessie’s paper wasn’t blank. It had a black dot. Then they started to stone her, and Tessie’s last words were “IT WASN’T FAIR!!”.
The moral of this story is that we shouldn’t always follow according to a old tradition, especially since the tradition could be bad and we shouldn’t do it anymore like the one in the story.