"Nasty, isn’t it?"  I nodded, my mouth too dry to speak.  "We had a bit of trouble getting it off her," she said, turning her face to reveal deep welts across her throat.

"I’m sorry," I managed to stammer.

She shrugged.  "Not your fault."  I remained silent because it was my fault. It was all my fault.

-oOo-

We’d only popped into Oxfam so I could rummage around their bargain book bin.  Nothing took my fancy so I turned to leave, but Trudy stopped me.

"Mun-kee.  I wan’ mun-kee," she said, tugging on my arm.

The first time I saw mun-kee, trepidation enveloped me like a sickly, cloying perfume.  There was something about him made my testicles crawl out of harms way.  Mun-kee was a soft toy with tatty brown fur that smelled of attics and neglect.  For a cuddly toy, its face seemed to repel hugs like iron filings from a magnet with its blank brown stare and stitched on grimace.  I didn’t want to spend too long looking at it.  It hurt my head, as if someone had placed it in a vice and was slowly turning the screws.

"You don’t want that," I told her.  "Look at this dolly.  It does wee-wee’s," aiming for distraction, gearing myself for outright bribery, knowing either one would work.  Either way, I wasn’t buying that awful monkey.  They didn’t.  She took the monkey off the shelf and hugged it to her chest.

"Mun-kee come home," she said, letting loose a stream of goosebumps. The trepidation had been replaced by suffocating foreboding.

I took mun-kee from her, meaning to put it back on its shelf.  The moment I touched it, I heard far-off screams.  Not outside in the street, but inside my consciousness.  I recognised them but couldn’t name who they came from.  They were screams of fear and dread, but most of all they spoke of the agony of lost things.  I dropped it.  Trudy started to yell.

"Mun-kee come home."  Everyone turned to stare at us.  I gave an embarrassed lop-sided grin while hissing ‘stoppit’, but Trudy carried on. "Mun-kee come home."  I grabbed her so we could leave, but she planted her feet and I ended up dragging her.  I noticed a fellow browser flip open her mobile.  She looked the type to have welfare services on speed-dial.

So I bought it.

To shut her up.

God, forgive me.  I bought it to shut her up.

-oOo-

"When did she last speak?"  The therapist stared at her clipboard, her pen poised above a blank space.  I thought back.

"About two years ago."

She gave me a cold stare.  "And you’ve waited ‘til now to bring her in?"  But it’s never as simple as that is it?  I honestly believed she would speak again.  But that’s beside the point; Trudy’s silence isn’t the reason why I finally brought her in.

-oOo-

Mun-kee became her favourite plaything.  She especially loved the fact that its fur un-zipped and she would take its outfit off revealing red and white cottony horizontal stripes.  Why?  What monkey can do that?  She called them his ‘jama’s.  I called it an abomination.

But it kept her quiet.  I decided I could live with mun-kee, as long as she kept it in her room and I never had to see it or touch it.

That was before the dreams.

At first it would appear in the distance, something seen and then forgotten.  But each night it seemed to get closer, to loom larger.  Until finally I saw its stitched-on grimace magnified to huge proportions as it lay across my face.  Its eyes burned into mine; blazing reds and sunset orange, becoming heavier, smothering me. Using a mouth which couldn’t talk, bypassing my ears and going straight for the brain, it spoke to me, and using Trudy’s voice it always said the same thing; ‘Mun-kee come home.’

-oOo-

They kept me informed of her progress.

"It won’t be long before we find her voice," the Doctor told me, even though I knew they were looking in the wrong place.  That all their examinations and tests won’t bring back that which no longer exists.  But most of all I couldn’t tell them what was really lost, apart from my failing as a father.  That somehow the essence that made her Trudy was also missing.  That all their complicated medical names would never diagnose the fact that the thing residing in that room was no longer my daughter.

-oOo-

A few months ago, I awoke covered in a faint sheen of perspiration, panting hard, knowing that I had to destroy mun-kee and make one last attempt to relieve her of her oppressive silence.  Trudy caught me with mun-kee’s ears held between my thumb and finger as he hung over the fire, my face screwed tight against the internal screams, ones I finally recognised as my own.  She snatched mun-kee away and wouldn’t come out of her room for a week.  A week where my dreams were tortured by images of Trudy lying like a discarded toy in a dusty attic.  When she finally emerged, I knew from her blank brown eyes and stitched-on grimace that he had taken her away for good.  That maybe my dream had come true.

That was when I finally decided to bring her in.

-oOo-

"You need to take the toy home, it’s not allowed in here.  It isn’t conducive to her recovery," the nurse said.  I stared at mun-kee, hope fading into despair.  It seemed that maybe I was too good a plaything to give up just yet.  And then without knowing what I was going to say, I spoke for the last time;

‘Mun-kee come home.’