The seventh child would be perfect. She would make sure of it, just as she made sure her hair was expertly coiffed each morning, and her front and back garden were in bloom when spring came.

The previous six came forth wailing ugly notes and flailing thick, bulbous arms and thighs. They’d been malformed, throwing what should have been cherubic off. The firstborn was inexplicably wretched, covered in blood, like weepy milkweed, and so she had to bury it the moment it detached. But that son had grown lovely orchids above him, the little dear, and so she was not mad at him anymore. And, at least, he told her what to expect with the second. She did not look at that daughter until the girl had been cleaned off and smoothed out, wrapped in a clean towel. But there were indents under her bright blue eyes, thick gashes where the skin met itself, so she too went into the ground and made tea roses that all the neighbor ladies stopped and admired. The third was a funny color, like rotten azaleas, but it had been close to beautiful, so she kept it in a pot against her bedroom window, and was now her tulip child. None of the rest had even come close, and so they were in the earth or in barrels of dirt, their tiny bones growing something more lovely above them.

It saddened her when she realized the imperfection was her own refined body. It was spoiling their pliant flesh before birth. So when the seventh child was seeded months in her belly, she reached inside herself and squeezed the slick, bloody flesh, put too much pressure on her bladder (she wet herself, but it was over the bathtub, and she held her breath until it was all down the drain), pinched his slippery toes between her thumb and forefinger and yanked him out.

She checked the normal things: ten fingers, ten toes, two feet, a torso, and two eyes evenly spaced. He wailed an unfinished voice, so she plugged her ears with wax and hummed La Vie en Rose.

She examined him under glass to see where the rot began, and there it was: his middle finger was a smidge too long. Glaringly wrong, wrong, wrong among the cultivated rest. She used garden shears, rusted from the sinewy threads of last year’s annuals, and deadheaded the tip. She kissed the mole near his eye. Pretty boy. Snip.

His finger leaked sappy blood, ugly sticky stuff, but she cooed him without looking, and when he’d calmed she bundled him up in her hands, spread her legs apart and shoved him back inside. Another month’s germination and she’d take him out again for another trim. When he came out for the last time, pruned, glorious, cut away to the best whole, he would be everything she could ever hope for, a real blue-ribbon winner of a boy.