There was this sound of screeching brakes again, on 96th and Broadway. And also this tiny almost silent sound, like the tipping on the shoulder. When I looked out the window just seconds later, all I saw was a brownish white dog, lying on her side, the green leash attached. She was motionless. There was no car. There were New Yorkers running towards the animal, pointing towards the direction of downtown traffic. A large black SUV stopped right in front of the dog and a red flashing went on in the middle of the windshield. A more obvious Police car was there another 20 seconds or so later. The Police stopped traffic. They built a little protective area around the dog with day glow orange cones. Now everybody stood around the dog as a larger and larger area of dark blood began to appear around the head of the animal. The dog made several very weak attempts to get up. The attempts were so weak that they almost looked like the last little movements before a long day’s sleep. Now the owner finally found her injured pet. I am too far away to make out faces of people on the corner but I could hear the screams, the cries of worry. It all looked very hopeless for quite a while. The police man from the large black SUV seemed to be sucking on his thumb. Some of the New Yorkers were still pointing in now very different directions. If a person were injured, they would have already been whisked off to one of the hospitals here. I do not think there are ambulances for pets yet. The policeman in uniform, who was on his cell phone almost since his arrival, pulled a bright yellow blanked out of his car. Several bystanders helped to spread it out next to the dog. It is very windy today so it took a little while until the body of the animal could be pulled onto the plastic blanket. There seemed to be blood everywhere now. The humans wrapped the dog as well as they could and placed it with great care onto the back seat of the police car. The scene was cleared and the car sped off with flashing s and the syren on towards .
There is a growing bloody area in the middle of the street. The tires of cars are turned into rubber stamps and spread the dark red in all directions. Blood just looks wet when it is on the asphalt, but the stripes of a crosswalk are now red-white-red.
I naïvely imagine that the dog will be fine enough to soon warn her friends at the dog-walk in Riverside Park, not to cross Broadway alone, not too quickly, not without the owner. I think i like this thought.