It is a bright and fresh morning on the twenty-seventh of June and the three hundred residents of a small village are in an excited yet nervous mood. The children are responsible for gathering stones, while the adults prepare for the main event, an annual rite dubbed "The Lottery." The local tradition is practiced to ensure a good harvest for the coming year. Old Man Warner preaches an old proverb: "Lottery in June, corn be heavy soon." Some of the townsfolk talk about how the practice of the lottery has been discontinued in other villages and that another village up north is also considering doing the same.

The night before, the postmaster, Mr. Graves, and the coal merchant, Mr Summers, drew up a list of all of the town's members. They prepared a set of paper slips, one for each resident, each blank except for one marked with a black dot. The slips were folded and placed in a black wooden box, locked up and stored in a safe in Mr. Summers' office until the time of the lottery the next day.

The townsfolk gather in the community center around ten in the morning the next day in order to have everything completed in time for lunch. The heads of each family first come up to draw one slip from the box and a man named Bill Hutchinson grabs the slip with the black dot. This means that his family has been selected. His wife, Tessie, protests that her husband did not have enough time to select a slip, but she is dismissed by the other townsfolk. A second drawing takes place to select a member of Bill's family — Bill himself, Tessie, or one of their three children. Each of the five draw a slip and Tessie receives the marked slip this time. The townspeople pick up the stones that were collected the previous night and begin to throw them at Tessie as she screams about the injustice of the practice of this tradition.