Praying for a Child with a Lotus Lantern

Have you heard of the lotus lantern ritual for bearing a son?

Slice a woman's flesh into lotus petals, use her bones for the wick and her blood for oil, and you can make a lotus lantern.

Eat the petals and drink the lamp oil, and your next child is guaranteed to be a boy.

I was the third lotus lantern my mother made. The first two were my younger sisters.

Every day, Mother ate the petals and drank the oil, worshipping the lotus lantern as a miracle.

But the day she became pregnant, I smiled.

Because there was never a little brother in Mother's belly.