Section 5 OMAM

• Lennie has killed his puppy by playing with it too roughly. He realises that he has done a bad thing by killing the puppy, and he tries to hide it in the straw: “Why you gotta get killed? You ain’t so little as mice.”
• Curley’s wife arrives and they begin having a conversation. She tells him about how she doesn’t like her new husband, Curley, because “he ain’t a nice fella”.
• Curley's wife goes on to talk about it has always been her dream to become a movie star and that she “coulda been in the movies, an' had nice clothes - all them nice clothes like they wear.” When Lennie tells her that he loves to pet soft things, she invites Lennie to stroke her soft hair.
• Lennie starts to get over excited when stroking Curley’s wife’s hair, and this causes her to panic and plead with him to stop so that he doesn’t “mess it all up”.
• Curley’s wife’s screaming causes Lennie to become scared, and he accidentally breaks her neck while trying to silence her. Curley’s wife is dead: "I don't want you to yell. You gonna get me in trouble jus' like George says you will. Now don't you do that.”
• Curley's wife's body is discovered by Candy soon after, and it is immediately obvious that Lennie must have killed her. George suggests to Candy that their dream of owning their own land is over once and for all: “I think I knowed we’d never do her.”
• The men organise a search party to find and kill Lennie, with Curley determined to be the one who shoots him: “I'm gonna shoot the guts outa that big bastard myself, even if I only got one hand. I'm gonna get 'im.”
• George is worried about Lennie: he can’t bear the thought of Curley and his men finding and killing him. Having taken Carlson’s gun from the bunkhouse, he sends the other men in the wrong direction and goes to find Lennie, who has remembered to go to the spot by the river and “hide in the brush”, just like George told him to.