The drawing
The morning of the Drawing always smelled like fry bread and dust.
Maren Voss noticed it every year, that specific combination of grease and dry desert air that rolled through Calico Flats the last Saturday of July. She used to love that smell as a girl. Now it sat in the back of her throat like something she couldn't quite swallow.
She ironed her blouse anyway. You dressed nice for the Drawing. That was just what you did.
Calico Flats, population 312, sat stubborn and sun-bleached in the crease between two mesas in the Arizona high desert. The kind of town that didn't show up on road signs anymore. The kind of town where everybody's grandfather had built something, a fence, a church, a grudge — and everyone else had simply inherited it.
The Drawing had been going on longer than anyone could exactly say. The oldest resident, a woman named Cora Finch who was ninety-one and mostly silent, sometimes said her own grandmother had participated. Nobody pressed her for more than that. You didn't press Cora.
The tradition was simple. Every household submitted one card to the tin box. Old Gerald Pruitt, who served as something between a mayor and a deacon depending on the day, would draw a single card at noon in the town square. Most cards were blank. One card had a small black dot, no bigger than a pencil eraser, pressed into its center.
If you drew the dot, the town came to the old wash behind the Baptist church at sundown with stones already in their pockets.
Nobody talked about why.
By eleven-thirty, the square was full. Lawn chairs ringed the old mesquite tree at the center. Children chased each other between adult legs. Dale Reeves was already drunk, which his wife Patty acknowledged with practiced invisibility. The Ochoa family stood close together, the way they always did on Drawing day, the four of them shoulder to shoulder like they could somehow share the odds.
Maren stood beside her neighbor, Ted, who was sixty-three and retired and who had, over the years, placed four stones into the wash himself. He was eating a paper plate of beans and smiling at nothing.
"You nervous?" Maren asked.
"Never am," he said. "Lord provides."
She didn't know exactly what the Lord was providing in this scenario, but she nodded.
Gerald climbed onto the flatbed of his truck at noon exactly, tin box under his arm. He was a tall man, red-faced, with the kind of authority that comes not from intelligence but from never once having doubted himself. He tapped the microphone, someone had run an extension cord from the hardware store, and the feedback squeal quieted the crowd.
"Another year," Gerald said. "Another Drawing."
There was applause. Actual applause.
"We gather as our families gathered. We honor what was built here. We keep what was given to us."
More applause. Maren clapped too. She hated that she clapped.
Gerald reached into the box without ceremony and pulled a card. He looked at it for a moment, just a breath too long, and then his eyes moved into the crowd and settled on a face.
The face belonged to a sixteen-year-old boy named Ellis Boone. He was standing near the lemonade table, still holding a red plastic cup, looking back at Gerald with the dawning and terrible comprehension of someone who has just understood a joke that isn't funny.
The crowd turned.
Ellis's mother made a sound that Maren would hear for the rest of her life, short, sharp, like something snapping, and then the sound was swallowed up by the silence that the town collectively held.
Then Ted, beside her, set down his paper plate and reached into his jacket pocket.
Maren didn't go to the wash.
She sat in her car in her driveway and listened to the desert go quiet the way it does at sundown, that absolute stillness before the night insects start. She sat there for a long time.
She thought about the year she was nine, and her father's card had been blank, and he'd laughed with relief and brought everyone ice cream from the cooler in his truck. She thought about how happy she'd been. How safe.
She thought about Ellis Boone, who had been in her Sunday school class four years ago and who had a habit of drawing little cars in the margins of his worksheets.
She thought about how she had clapped.
A man named David Reyes had asked questions once. He'd moved to Calico Flats from Tucson in 2009, married a local woman, and after his first Drawing he'd driven to the county sheriff's office forty miles east and filed a report.
The sheriff, who had grown up in Calico Flats, listened politely, refilled his coffee, and explained that some communities had their ways and that nobody had ever actually proven anything and that David might be happier somewhere else.
David left Calico Flats the following spring.
His wife stayed.
What Maren kept coming back to, sitting in that car, hands in her lap, was not the cruelty of it. She had made her peace, in some ugly internal way, with the cruelty. People were cruel. History was cruel.
What she couldn't get past was the beans.
The paper plates and the lawn chairs and the children running and Dale Reeves drunk by noon and the fry bread smell and the applause — the absolute, mundane, neighborly normalcy of it. The way it asked nothing of you except your presence and your pocket full of stones. The way it felt, if you didn't look straight at it, like any other summer afternoon in a small town where everybody knew your name.
That was the thing about Calico Flats.
It didn't feel like a place where something was wrong.
It felt like home.
And somehow, after all these years, Maren still wasn't sure which of those things frightened her more.
Credits to Shirley Jackson For the book "The Lottery"