"The Lottery" by Shirley Jackson

1.24.22

“The Lottery”

I have this thing where I forget stories. Maybe it’s all the drugs I did when I was younger (way, way too many drugs for a developed or developing brain), or maybe it’s that my brain can only hold so much. Sometimes it makes me feel less intelligent, not good enough to be a writer. I’m not great at referencing stories I haven’t read in a long time.

So, when I read The Lottery, a story I hadn’t read in a few years, I was unprepared for everything. For some reason I remembered The Hunger Games and my brain told me, this story is like The Hunger Games. So as I read I looked for The Hunger Games. I didn’t find them, except in the gathering of a community, the vouching for those who are absent. The dread.

This story is brilliant in the way it holds itself in like a tightly buttoned jacket concealing a homemade bomb. The jacket looks prim, unobtrusive, and yet the fabric gives way in certain places, subtly re…