The story begins when the people of the village began to gather in the square. Some of
the children are gathering stones. The narrator was like making a warning earlier in the
story by mentioning the pile of stones and the way the older people distance themselves
from it. "They stood together, away from the pile of stones in the corner, and their jokes
were quiet and they smiled rather than laughed." For me, she was telling us readers that
something that's not right is going to happen. At the end of the story it was confirmed
that this is a annual ritual in which villagers draw paper slips in the black box to select
one member of