The next day it turned out that the others had had similar experiences. One of my friends, the boy who always wore black-framed glasses, told us about the deterioration of his plush toy named Nyinyi. My bespectacled friend’s thinking was a bit slow and dim – a year or two later he was sent to another school because his learning difficulties had become too severe.

There is a chance – but not a certainty, because I didn’t stop to talk to him, I simply walked by as if he was a discarded soda can or a cigarette butt on the cold concrete – that I passed by my friend a couple of years ago, now an adult. My friend apparently lived on the streets, he had a thick blanket wrapped around his waist. There was a tin can by his feet with some coins in it. My friend kept staring straight ahead like someone who had stopped counting the minutes and days long ago and let time flow effortlessly through him. He was still wearing the black-framed glasses, which he kept sparkling clean just like in his childhood. I didn’t turn towards him, and I didn’t give him money. I wanted to get the miserable man out of my sight as quickly as possible. Maybe it wasn’t even my friend, just someone who looked like him.

When my friend was still a kid, he told me how Nyinyi’s condition took a turn for the worse. Under Nyinyi’s tiny, fluffy tail a hole opened up – it was not even the thread but the fabric itself that loosened, allowing Nyinyi’s freshly torn anus to eject thick red fiber onto the floor. My friend tried to push the yarn back, but he only made the hole bigger. My other two friends, the boy and the girl, listened in shock first to my bespectacled friend’s account, then to mine. Later that week their own plush toys started to deteriorate as well. One morning the girl found her toy Ferkó with a severed arm – his right arm had detached from his body during the night. The other boy’s plush toy, Egyes, went into paralysis. We didn’t quite understand what this meant, since we all knew that plush toys don’t move by themselves, only when we move them or imagine them to be moving. Well, my friend’s toy didn’t move anymore. He didn’t die, my friend told me; he was one hundred percent alive, only disabled. Soon after, the stuffing started to pour out of Egyes’ mouth – the sickness made him vomit up his own guts.

We were all faced with the situation that our plush toys were losing their vital filling, and we knew all too well from movies we had seen that such an excessive loss leads to certain death. We needed a transfusion to keep our toys alive, and for this we had to find other, still-living plush toys.