On a beautiful day, the residents of a small, remote village gather at the town square for the town lottery. In other towns, the lottery takes up most of the day, but there are only 300 people in this village, so the lottery only takes two hours. The children, who have just finished school, run around to collect stones. They put the stones in their pockets and make a collective heap on the floor of the square. The men gather next, followed by the women. Parents call their children over and stand together as the lottery starts.
Mr. Summers runs the lottery because he puts in a lot of effort into helping the village out. He arrives in the square with the black box, followed by Mr. Graves, the postmaster. Mr. Summers is always bringing up the need to make a new box because the current one is worn, but no one wants to disobey tradition. Mr. Summers did, however, influence the villagers to replace the original wood chips with paper slips.
Mr. Summers shuffles the paper slips in the box. He and Mr. Graves made the papers the night before and hid and locked the box at his coal company warehouse. Before the lottery began, they make a list of all the families and households in the village.
Tessie Hutchinson franticly rushes into the square, because she forgot that today was lottery day. She joins her husband and children in the midst of the crowd, while people mock her procrastination. Mr. Summer takes atendance, and prepares to begin the drawing process.
Mr. Summers reminds everyone about the rules: he will read the surnames, and the men of the family come up and draw a slip. No one is to look at their slips until everyone has drawn. Once Mr. Summers finishes calling names, and everyone opens his or her papers. Word quickly spreads around the crowd that Bill Hutchinson ‘got it’. Tessie objects that it wasn’t fair. Mr. Summers asks Bill whether there are any other households in the Hutchinson family, which he says no to.
Mr. Graves dumps the remaining slips out of the box onto the ground and puts five back in for the Hutchinsons. As Mr. Summers calls their names, each member of the family comes up and draws a slip. When they open their slips, they find that Tessie has drawn the paper with the black dot on it.
Mr. Summers instructs everyone to hurry up, as they do. The villagers grab stones from the children’s collection and start to pelt Tessie, who stands in a clearing in the middle of the crowd. Tessie says it’s not fair as she is knocked out by a stone to the head.