The situation soon turned more dire. Vili’s skin burst in several places, but not along the stitching like before: the plush itself had worn so much that the wear eventually became a hole, through which the life-­giving filling flowed out. These parts were harder to staple because the fabric would often burst or grow precariously thin. Vili’s friendly eyes also became blurred. They were covered in some kind of fog, as if his plastic eyes had faded from the inside. One afternoon, as I was trying to close up his latest wounds, Vili’s left eye fell out of its place and hit the floor with a thud. I felt like I was going to vomit. Vili was looking at me blindly with his one eye, while where his other eye should have been there was only plush and filling. I wanted to scream, but I bit my arm instead. I didn’t dare hug Vili because I was scared his other eye would fall out as well. I tried to glue the fallen eye back, but my efforts were clearly in vain. The eye had nothing to stick to anymore, it would just fall out again along with the stuffing. I knew that Vili’s time remaining would soon be up.

At that point Vili was no longer able to sleep from the pain. I would listen to his groaning all night long, his begging, swearing, and cursing. This was not the Vili I knew – my Vili always knew what was right, even if the harder path was the right one. But at night the dying Vili loathed the world that doomed him to suffer – he would either insult everyone and everything with spite, or moan out of terror like a lunatic. He did his best to hold it together during the day, but he spoke less and less. He grew distant, and sometimes I could hear him cursing in the daytime as well.

After a while, his other eye went blurry and eventually fell out. I put red tape in the place of his eyes, so Vili spent his final days with two red X’s on his face. The scattered limbs, eyes, and fluffy insides were starting to cause us more trouble. The boys complained that the scattered filling was infecting their other toys with sickness – the wheels detached from their Matchbox cars, their plastic soldiers fell apart, and their Lego pieces didn’t fit together anymore. The girl attempted to work out the meticulous protocol of our plush toys’ dying process because her parents were doctors. Hence, following the girl’s advice, we started to collect the potentially infectious plush body parts in resealable plastic bags, drawing the universal biohazard symbol on the bags with black markers. I placed Vili’s eyes, stuffing, and one of his legs that had detached in the meantime into one of these bags.