The delivery truck fell on the man and his dog at the corner of Nassau and Broadway. The turn was too tight and the driver went up on the curb causing the truck to tip and the weight of televisions inside the truck to shift. I was ten yards away, saw the truck lose its balance, and jumped back, bumping into the man behind me who wasn't paying attention.

Eyewitnesses were screaming. The man couldn't be seen under the truck. The driver must have had a seatbelt on. The truck had fallen over on its right side, so he climbed out and sat on the door because the jump down was more than he could make. Blood dripped onto his clean yellow T-shirt.

The police fire engine came within minuets, then the ambulance and fire engine. A crowd gathered and I told people around me what I had seen, excited and guilty about this reason I had to talk to strangers. "A hospital is around the corner," I said.

The man behind me called his wife on his cell phone and explained what had just happened, but he hadn't seen it first hand. "I was looking at a scratch on my shoe," he told her. "Some kid on the subway stepped on my foot." Then the man repeated to his wife what I'd said. That a black guy walking his terrier had been waiting at the corner for the light to change when the truck tipped over and trapped them underneath. I heard the terrier yelp and then the yelping stopped. The man told his wife that detail like it was his, but he hadn't heard the silence. He'd been looking at his shoe. He might've heard a dog yelp, but to his ear it was just any dog, and not the last sound of a dog.

The man was buried in Queens on a Tuesday morning. I stood in the back of the cemetery and watched his family in dark clothes, heads bowed, crying into white tissues. A toddler wandered off and picked flowers. In his obituary in the Times, they wrote that he had shined shoes for thirty years in the lobby of the Prudential building. His customers called him by his last name, McGee, and he brought his dog to work with him, looped Taffy?s leash over the wooden footrest.

A cab pulled up slowly and the man with the scratched shoe got out. He looked over at me, nodded, but didn't recognize me from the accident. I had an embarrassingly good memory for faces, and often passed him as I walked to my job at the electronics outlet on Murray Street. Last week he bit into a jelly donut and stained his paisley tie.