Vili’s stench became unbearable, and he couldn’t articulate his words anymore. His voice was like a slightly open door through which the coldness of the grave could reach me. I couldn’t stand watching him suffer anymore, and I couldn’t bear my own exhaustion either.

I used the knife and the scissors. I feel ashamed recalling this – I stood over him for hours with the blades in my hand and I cried. My hands shook; whatever I had done before didn’t matter now, only this one act of murder. Vili kept begging me to do it, he tried to catch my eyes with his red, blind ones. At last I did it. I forced myself to cut him open as meticulously as I had with the other toys. After the first cut, for a brief moment, he was his old self again, the old Vili. I chose the harder path, and that made the ensuing hours somewhat easier, the silence in my head, the complete absence of Vili. I howled loudly over Vili’s body until my mother found me upon her return from the store. She caressed my head while I hugged her legs, seeking safety and compassion. She soothed me, and then she said that one sentence, which I think made me hate her forever.

Don’t cry, it was just a plush toy.

My mother explained to me that you have to make the cadaver resemble its living counterpart as best you can – you can’t bury a person with their insides and limbs scattered all over inside the coffin. We reassembled Vili’s body, pushing back as much stuffing as possible, stapling his skin together so he would resemble his old self again. He didn’t – his body was the most horrible sight; his face was a deformity, his friendly smile now a cut-­up grin of insanity. We placed the body in a plastic bag. I demanded that we put some onion into the bag as well – my mother gave in, chopped a bit of red onion and sprinkled it beside Vili. Then we buried the bag in the back yard – I also placed a small cross on the grave. My mother offered me sweets again, then told me to clean my room.

The next morning, I found the cross fallen over and the grave disturbed, as if the earth had been moved from below. My backpack dropped from my hands because I knew that Vili had returned.

Of course, I had alternative theories as well. It could have been an animal that dug up the body, or even a person, a poor child who could only afford dead toys. Perhaps it was Nyinyi who had come for Vili in order to take his distorted body and present it at a gathering of the undead: Look, this is what mankind does to us.

The girl explained to me how it happened, not then, but years later, as an adult.