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.

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.