He was cursing me.

Our friend with the glasses was first. One day he found Nyinyi lifeless on the floor. Nyinyi had passed away in his sleep. Our friend’s parents threw Nyinyi’s corpse in the trash, and when the body disappeared from the trash can, leaving behind dirty marks on the floor, they resorted to spanking their son, despite his firm insistence that he hadn’t touched Nyinyi’s corpse. The second night after Nyinyi’s disappearance our friend saw him from his window. The deceased toy was dragging a dead cat through the street, disappearing under a garbage bin with his victim. The next day our friend examined the bin and its surroundings but found nothing but used stuffing.

Vili talked less and less; he would instead broadcast a sort of feeling, like a radio station. I’m ready, he broadcast to me, I’m ready to die. He had suffered enough; his eyes couldn’t see anything but red, every single breath was an agony. He asked me both verbally and non­verbally to end it all.

Naturally for a long time I resisted. Though I killed off many other plush toys just so Vili could live, killing Vili was a different matter. On the other hand I also knew that Vili had to die. My mother’s prophecy had to be fulfilled, otherwise all this suffering would have been in vain.

Meanwhile, the girl’s plush toy died as well – she found him in the middle of her room when she got home from school. The stuffing was still pouring out of his emaciated body, his hands stretched forward as if trying to reach something. The girl read up on the topic, and she found that the only way to prevent our plush toys from being resurrected was to bury them together with an onion – at least that’s how I understood it at the time.

She acted according to her theory: she put the corpse in a resealable plastic bag and sprinkled some bits of onion around it. The plush toy didn’t return. We all felt relieved when we learned that, except for our friend with the glasses, since Nyinyi was still stalking around his house. Several dogs and cats went missing, and one night someone tried to break into the apartment through one of the ground-floor windows. The policemen who arrived on the scene found only cotton wool.

Vili begged incessantly to die, night after night and morning after morning, hardly allowing me a moment’s rest. At the same time a new theory started to circulate among my friends, prompted by Nyinyi’s increasingly aggressive activities – that our plush toys crave death because it breaks the bond between them and humans so they don’t have to serve us children anymore, and they can roam the world equipped with the power of the grave, equipped with the power of the Black Emperor. We deduced that there must be more plush toys like Nyinyi out there, they might be gathering in the canals and at the bottom of forgotten cardboard boxes, scheming viciously, planning their revenge on us who created them, gave them voice and life, only to eventually take it away from them.