Death of an Innocent

This has been sitting in my Google drive and not posted like I thought. Sorry! The Lottery "All right," Mr. Summers said. "Open the papers. Harry, you open little Dave's." Mr. Graves opened the slip of paper and a murmur rippled through the crowd as he held it up to reveal the black spot on the inside. Mr. Summers had drawn it the night before with the heavy pencil in the coal company office. Nancy and Bill Jr. wordlessly held up their blank slips as Bill Hutchison held his up and hung his head. Tessie dropped her blank slip and rushed over to little Dave, scooping him up in her arms. “It isn’t fair” she cried. Mr. Summers gently pried Dave out of her hands, depositing him on the ground in the center of a cleared space. "All right, folks." Mr. Summers said gravely. "Let's finish quickly.” Although the villagers had forgotten the ritual and lost the original black box, they still remembered to use stones. The pile of stones the boys had made earlier was ready; there were stones on the ground with the blowing scraps of paper that had come out of the box. Mrs. Delacroix selected a stone so large she had to pick it up with both hands and turned to Mrs. Dunbar. "Come on," she said. "Hurry up." Mrs. Dunbar had small stones in both hands, and she said, gasping for breath, "I can't run at all. You'll have to go ahead and I'll catch up with you." There little Dave stood, playing with a few of the paper scraps on the ground as the villagers closed in on him. His mother gave a muffled shout as another housewife restrained her, and Dave turned his head at the sound. The first stone struck the side of his head and he began to cry. I reimagined this ending because I thought it made the underlying horror of the story’s premise more resonant. The death of a housewife, while horrifying, is inherently less brutal than the death of an innocent who doesn’t understand the lottery system in the first place. In the original ending, the crowd is relieved that Davy doesn’t get chosen, so I wanted to explore if they would still go along with the stoning when it was a child at risk. I think this ending better shows the lengths the villagers are willing to go to in the name of tradition, since they’re not killing an adult who has willingly participated in the lottery many times when it wasn’t her turn. Davy’s death would call into question the fairness of a lottery, and if it was worth doing one at all. Keeping with this, I had Mrs. Hutchinson protest the unfairness of her son being chosen instead of her being chosen like in the original story. This would be in character, since she vehemently protested the fact that her family was chosen at all. I tried to capture the original story’s writing style, retaining the minimalistic word choice and nondescript tone to portray my revised ending. In some parts, I used sections of the actual text to integrate with the rest of the ending. I wanted to convey the sense of horror and slow realization evoked by the original phrasing, while making it even more shocking. To do this, I tried to keep the pacing and action roughly the same.