Three drops of blood.

A boy ripped from the womb will cause blood to be spilled, but the definition of womb is confused; is the womb from the body, or the protective womb of childhood?
Cultural rites of passage dictate the right age to pass into adulthood, but at the age of eight, thirteen, or eighteen is any person truly an adult?
Life flows through our veins as we course through our lives, but at what point does our life stop coursing, though life keeps flowing and pulling us to catastrophes like a mighty, addictive river?

Three drops of blood.

On his bar mitzvah day his world swirled like his head in the toilet while the cantor cried “sh’ma”. Sh’ma Yisrael, Adonai Eloheinu, Adonai Echad: Hear O’ Israel, the Lord is your God, The Lord is one!
Three days later his world came crashing down like the tree that fell on his parent’s car.
He was crippled by anger and fear like his mother from the waist down who was now wasting away, and killed by the doubt and sadness like his father.
He thought he knew his future like he knew his alphabet, but he’d only seen it like he’d seen the face of god; he never saw either.

Three drops of blood.

A boy ripped from the womb will cause blood to be spilled.
Is any person truly an adult?
Life flows, like a mighty, addictive river.

Three drops of blood.

The first drop came from the third girl he’d tried his luck with, and when he couldn’t get lucky but kept trying he got slapped.
She was never found, and her parents cried the whole way home from the county hospital.
The second drop spurted from his broken heart when it stopped beating after the heroin gained its name of fame and infamy in his mother’s heart, while the needle landed with loudest clatter on the kitchen floor in the quietest room in the entire house.
The third drop was for his younger brother who couldn’t stand the pain when he stood so he sat in a bathtub filled with ice water and dropped an electric wire like his brother’s grades when that heroic drug of his hit him hard across the skull.

Three drops of blood.

The cantor cried: Sh’ma Yisrael, Adonai Eloheinu, Adonai Echad: Hear O’ Israel, the Lord is your God, The Lord is one!
The cantor cried.

Three drops of blood.

Three crimson drops, stained upon his white shirt collar, mixed with black tar and motherly tears, covered in cheap cologne and cheaper alcohol, and mixed with a hypodermic needle etched like a diamond that cuts up lives instead of cutting up gems.

Three drops of blood.

His name was Aaron Leibowitz.