Eight principal named adults, ages thirty to seventy-eight, plus the ninth adult player; peripheral named cameos and the changing attendee crowd are adults, and the crowd has no individual dialogue or choices. No person under eighteen appears or is spoken of as present. No sexual content, violence, danger, injury, illness, bereavement, crime, emergency, debt or supernatural events. The story concerns a social game in a neighbourhood hall that nobody is threatening to take away, a caller who leaves a silence before roughly one call in nine, a woman who hears that silence and is not asked to explain it, a man who is competitive out loud and careful about other people's property all evening, a man who draws small pictures in the margin of his card, a woman on night shifts who is not there some weeks and owes nobody an account of it, and a superstition about a number taken seriously by one person. The pot is a pound a sheet with a quarter of it going to the heating.