"Smashed cupcake."

Scratchy has the inkblots out again. He does that when he can't think of anything else to do. He drums his fingers on his desk for a couple seconds, frowning at his blank legal pad and unused pencil to keep from frowning at me. And then, finally, shows me another one.

"Spilled motor oil."

Whenever I do this, I remember Dot complaining about the Rorschach tests never looking like anything. I told her they look like plenty of things. Scratchy replaces the motor oil one with another, still not even touching his pen. Sometimes he'll doodle if he gets really bored. Probably to keep the writing implement and paper from feeling useless. Those doodles can get pretty gruesome, too. I mean, if Scratchy needs to draw things like-

Oh. Scratchy clears his throat. Or fakes clearing it, he always sounds like he's coughing up a lung either way. I have to refocus on the blot. I tilt my head, my face scrunched up. I sort of don't want to say it, but hey, this is Scratchy we're talking about. If there was, say, a very attractive lady in the room, of course, I would never be this gross or anything. Not that it's all that gross, I mean, everyone-

"Yakko? Hello?"

"Pile of feces . . . Dog feces." It just comes out. I don't smirk or anything. I just keep staring at it. That actually stops Scratchy for a second. He looks at the card, and then back at me. I like that word- feces. It's one of those words that sound a lot better than what the word describes. Well, to me. Wakko says he would never eat something with a name like "feces," but that's just because he knows what it means.

He sighs and picks up another.

"Explosion."

He writes something down after that one. It makes me feel good, for some reason. Good for the paper and pen. That's sort of weird, especially since it's not one of those creepy sentient normally-inanimate objects, as far as I can tell. But you never know. Those guys sometimes will pretend, when they're really watching you undress and shower and sleep. Total creepers. No offense to any of you that might be reading this, of course. Unless you're one of those creepers.

"Melted chocolate." I really miss Wakko and Dot. I mean, it's been a whole hour and a half since I've seen them. "Squashed bug." I wonder what they're doing. Probably something fun, having nothing to do with splotches of ink that just barely look like spilled and squashed and exploding things. "Smaller pile of dog feces." Maybe Wakko is chasing Hello Nurse or some other girl around, and Dot . . .

I sort of stir from my half-paying-attention state when I realize Scratchy isn't holding up a new one. He's just sitting there and staring at me. One finger is twitching, like he needs to start drumming them against the desk again, but he doesn't want to for some reason.

"Yakko, please," he says. He doesn't elaborate, which is a bit annoying.

"What? That's what I see."

"Please?"

But he holds up another one before I can even open my mouth. It looks a lot like a gruesome road kill. But I don't say that, since the answers that come to my head first don't seem to suffice for Scratchy. Instead, I say "Ominous clouds." He nods, like there's a right answer and I had chosen it, and writes more. I wish he would slow down. I don't like his weird chicken scratch handwriting.

I have to tear my eyes away from the illegible writing to look up at the new blot. It looks like a mass of flies gathered in some grotesque ball. I can almost hear their noises and my eyes are tricking me into seeing it pulse and swell like it really is what I think it is. But instead I say, "Mass of pain."

Gosh, the look on Scratchy's face when I say that. He's so happy. So, so happy. And his right hand is moving so fast, and the pencil is making this scraping sound against the paper so much that it pushes the noise the flies are making right out of my head.

"There, you see," he says, and he hasn't even stopped writing yet. "Isn't is so much easier when you let go of the jokes?" Finally, he's done, and he smashes the pencil into the paper for his last period to make sure everyone knows it.

Now this next one looks pretty spooky. There's a pretty distinct cat head near the top left corner, and the rest looks like the cat's body exploded everywhere, so that's what I tell Scratchy, especially since he seemed to like my 'explosion' comment earlier.

He actually sighs, though, and shakes his head. I frown. "That's what I see! Look." I stand and have to jump up onto the desk to get to a good height, and then snatch the blot from Scratchy's hand and turn it to him. I outline the cat head with my pointer finger, and just sort of stare at him and nod. He leans his cheek against his hand, and has that pencil between his pointer and middle finger on the hand he's not leaning against. He's juggling it around like crazy. I wonder if he can do that trick to make look like it's elastic and wiggling around everywhere. There must be something wrong with my wrist, because I just can never manage to do it.

Anyway, I then illustrate the explosion of the rest of the cat by putting the tips of all of the fingers on one hand together, placing them where the cat's guts probably used to be, and then splaying them out until my palm smacks against the blot, making a nice 'phew' sound with my mouth all the while. That's probably more like a missile or something than an explosion, but I think I get the point across with it.

Scratchy doesn't look very convinced, and certainly not very amused. He doesn't even have to tell me out loud to put down the blot, get off his desk, and go sit down and answer correctly, like a good boy. It's in his eyes and his frown. I don't like it when he does that.

We go through some more. He likes most of my answers. He fills up at least three pages of that legal pad. But a couple times he just give me that "be a good boy" face and changes it without writing a thing. If Wakko and/or Dot were here, we could totally play this game we have. Basically the goal is to get Scratchy to write the most or least, depending on what we decide while we're waiting to go in. It's pretty easy to win when we try to get him to write the least. Making him write more takes a little more work.

But then one makes me stop. One makes me just completely stop.

Scratchy must be saying something, but I just don't hear him. He's probably moving, but not enough to get the blot out of my view. Even when he does, I'm long past actually seeing it. I'm seeing and hearing other things.

There's a woman. Not in the inkblot, the inkblot is nothing conceivable to me. Nothing more than a trigger. She's just an image in my head. She looks like Wakko and Dot and me. Looks like she could be our mother.

But she's not. We don't have a mother. We were drawn, not born.

And there's a man. He's not our father, he looks nothing like us. He's not even a toon. But he makes me feel small and stupid and this sort of half-fear, half-anger. That's just from looking at him.

But he's really beating her up. He's got this huge book in his hands. A phone book. He's keeps smacking her with it, mostly her head. She's so much smaller, it makes me sick. He tears pages out and tries to stuff them in her mouth, too, like he wants her to eat them, and she's just choking on them and crying. It seems like the kind of thing you do when you're really, really crazy. Not the funny kind of crazy. There isn't a funny kind of crazy anymore when you see something like that.

I know why he's doing it. We're in an apartment building, and the neighbors have already complained too many times to count and called the police at least twice. We'll get kicked out if Mom keeps screaming like she had been before he stuffed the pages in her mouth.

Oh, no. No. Not we. They. They're in the apartment building. I'm not in the room, Wakko's not in the room, Dot's not in the room. We've never stepped foot in there.

And not Mom. The woman. Maybe she was his mom, their mom, but she's not mine, not ours. I was not born. I was drawn. I am not him. My Wakko is not his Wakko, my Dot is not his Dot. And that human, whatever he was to him, is nothing to me. Less than nothing.

It would be pretty sick if that human was their father, or one of their fathers.

It's pretty sick that a toon named Yakko, with a mother and a father and a childhood and a future into growing up to be an adult, and siblings he helped raise and protect and loved, decided that he didn't want that for himself or his siblings. He didn't want his memories of his childhood or his parents or to grow up to be anything like them. And he didn't want that for his siblings, no matter what they themselves really wanted. The choice wasn't theirs.

It's sick that he killed them, that this Yakko that was just like me killed his zany little brother, Wakko, and his cute baby sister, Dot. That he killed himself. That this makes me sure I'm capable of doing the same.

It's sick that the person who drew me and my siblings agreed to do it, agreed to make copies of them once they were dead. Copies that wouldn't have the memories, the previous childhoods, the parents, the possibility of growing up. Just different enough to work, but not different enough to be legal, to be right. To not be anything but copies.

It's sick that they would kill us if they knew. Anyone. Scratchansniff, Slappy, Buster, Babs, Bugs. Snap our necks, any one of them, no matter how much they used to like us, love us. Because you can't love a copy.

I feel myself coming back, just barely. I hear Scratchansniff's voice, but I still can't see him. I can feel that my face is wet and everything hurts and I'm standing up. That makes me feel dizzy, but I keep walking. I trip and stumble and feel hands on me, but I fight them away. I think I have my claws out, because the hands withdrawal pretty fast. I wasn't supposed to get those claws. He had them and didn't like them.

Just like the memories. I'm no supposed to have those, either. But here we are.

I just want to see my siblings. The only two things Yakko ever gave me that I love. I don't even care that he had to kill his to give me mine. I can't care. I just care that they are mine.

He gave me his personality, too, though. The one that was beaten into him, the little quirks he never tried to fix, and then imprinted them in my brain. The loud noises and the people that are a lot bigger than me and the unfamiliar settings all being so terrifying. The ability to act and lie and manipulate when I'm brave enough or scared enough. The fear that I'll slip and tell someone, anyone. Our secrets are different, but our fear is the same. That, if I ever felt the need to end my life, I know I would take Wakko and Dot with me.

All these things, I have them. I can never be happy or normal as long as I do, and they're never going away. The choice wasn't mine, or the real Wakko and Dot's, nor my Wakko and Dot's. It's all Yakko's fault.

Perhaps the greatest thing Yakko gave me was his hate. I hate him.

I hate him.

And I hope he's burning in Hell.