To tears. The story of the best friend

I live in an ordinary, unremarkable bedroom community in a northern city. The neighborhood is small, and almost everyone here knows each other. It’s essentially like a village, only a little more civilized.

Next door lives a wonderful family: mom, dad, eight-year-old son and their good-natured dog Phoenix. Fenya (as the dog was called by the owners), was not only a family member, but also the best friend of the boy. And everyone in the yard loved the dog for his good-natured disposition. Phoenix was actually a very nice nice dog, got on very well with children, and with other animals, too. And the local grannies kept telling me:

– Look how good Fenia is, he plays with children, and your rascal only knows how to chase cats around the yard!

One autumn day, as I remember from the boy’s mother, her son woke up, washed his face, sat down to breakfast, and, as usual, shared cutlets with Fenya. Everything was as usual: the boy went to play with Fenya in his room, while his mother and father did their chores. Suddenly the doorbell rang, it was Sashka, the boy’s classmate. The mother went to notify her son, and coming to the door, paused. The door was open, the boy was sitting on the floor, hugging the dog, and said:

– I will never leave you, I will never give you up to anyone, because you are my friend, and Daddy said that friends are sacred.

Mom, smiling, came into the room and said, laughing

– Hey, bandits! Stop sitting on the cold floor, get up! Maxim, Sashka is here to see you, he wants you to ride his bike. Go, while it’s still the last warm days.

– Don’t be bored, Fen, you can steal pancakes from your mother’s house! – said the boy and hurried outside.

The children were playing in the yard and were about to leave, but an accident happened near the doorway. The boys, who were crossing the road, were hit by a car driven by a rather tipsy woman. But Maxim fell and hit his head on the curb and slipped into a coma.

This was a very strong shock for his parents – their son was hanging by a thread from death. On top of that, the howling dog wouldn’t let him rest. After this happened, Phoenix would not move from the door and was constantly howling. No one could calm him down. No tasty bones could comfort him. The howling was so strong that after a while Maxim’s parents kicked the dog out into the yard. They no longer cared about the dog’s life, they were so desperate that it was impossible to look at them without tears. The dog never left the yard, we fed him along with the tenants of the house. We understood how difficult it was for the boy’s parents, and we even tried to take the dog back to ourselves, but he showed aggression to any attempt to placate him.

A couple of months passed and winter came. One December day, the dog disappeared. Maxim came to his senses on New Year’s Eve, and some time later, he was already walking with his parents in the yard of our house. The hospital is three houses away from ours. So when the boy came to, but was still very weak, we almost all carried him parcels, all kinds of notes with cheerful content which his parents reread to him, fruit, juice. When Maxim gained some strength and came home, he asked a question:

– Mom, where is Fenya?

To which his mother replied:

– God took the Phoenix and brought you back to us, son…

And in the spring, when the snowdrifts melted, the dog was found frozen in the backyard of the hospital, almost opposite the ward where Maxim was laid. To say that Phoenix was remembered by all the residents is nothing to say. The boy made a promise to himself that he would never get a dog again, justifying it by the words: “There can only be one BEST friend in life…”.