Frau Eicher, as usual, took the children to the errands, and what she saw at the butcher's surprised her so much she mentioned it to her master and mistress. Josef had looked with quite an interest at how the butcher dressed rabbit, the hanging pigs and cow halves. A child feeling attracted by animal corpses was nothing abnormal, his siblings had also shown curiosity, but they showed their disgust after it—Josef did not. The cook commented it to his parents because the way he looked at the meat was really peculiar; how he cocked his head to one side to see better, how the counted in a whisper the ribs, how his finger moved, tracing the skeleton and muscles, how he squinted behind his glasses. Like a tiny professor, she said.

Mother shook her head and chuckled dismissively ("children!"), but Father pondered about it for long. In the end, he decided that this was something that had to be taken into consideration and so looked for his son all around the house.

"Have you seen your brother?" He asked Klara, his twin sister.

Almost immediately after she replied that she had no idea of where he was, Josef appeared. It seemed he tried to go unnoticed. His mother would give him a good one in the butt when she saw him, for staining his white shirt and making a hole in his shorts scraping his knees—she would be glad to find that his glasses were dirty as well but apparently intact, though.

"The Osswald's dog again?" Father asked when he saw him in that deplorable state.

Josef nodded. Father approached and bent down to take a look at his bleeding knees.

"This is nothing. It just needs water and soap. You can walk fine, can't you? Good. Come, Josef, there is something I want to ask you."

Being taken to Father's office to have a private conversation was never promising, but Father insisted that he had nothing to fear, he was not going to be reprimanded. He sat at his desk and ordered Josef to sit in front of him. He crossed his hands on the table.

"Tell me, son, what do you want to be when you grow up?"

Josef was silent for a long while. "I don't know", he finally admitted.

"Gustav is six and he already knows he wants to join the Air Force. Your sister plays teachers every day. There must be something you like to do."

Josef shrugged. "I like...inventing."

"Inventing? Oh, yes, the shock-alarm, the mood-change detector you made...But Josef, inventing won't feed you."

"Edison became rich."

"The exceptional can live on it. You should find something with a future...Do you like Medicine?"

"Medicine? Not really."

"Doctors have, are and will always be needed. We are reputed and our job is more interesting than it seems."

"I don't know, Father, I don't find healing flus interesting at all..."

Josef's gaze wandered around the room. The diplomas hanging on the walls, the large library, which covered almost all the space, the pictures with so many valued members of the community...The house's phone would never stop ringing with people coming from everywhere, from all social classes, wanting to see Father.

"If I was a doctor like Frankenstein, using medicine and electricity to build the Übermann..." Josef muttered.

Father chuckled.

"I see you have been ignoring your mother's advice and picked up books that were not meant for your age." He smiled. "I'm not angry, but I don't want you to get high hopes. That is only science fiction. You've got to be realistic. You'll be turning nine next September: you've got to start thinking about your future. You're almost a little man...And I have the feeling that you are interested in anatomy, yes? What makes the muscles work, the bone structure, the diseases of the brain..."

"Who told you?" Josef blinked surprised.

"It is just impossible not to notice: your eyes gleam every time you find something related to the subject. Doctors have the chance to explore the human body, you know? Discover and cure diseases, reconstruct faces accidents and war have disfigured..."

He was seeing that the little fish had taken interested in his bait. It was time to attract him until he bit it. He stood up, took a book with leather covers from his library and handed it to Josef.

"The human body and mind are way more interesting than meat. I don't want to pressure you. I just think your iron stomach and curiosity for anatomy are perfect for this profession." While he was talking, his son opened the book. The first thing he saw was a figure of a pregnant woman, like cut in half, with the baby inside a bag in her belly. He flipped the pages so distracted by what he was seeing that he almost didn't pay attention to what his father said. He didn't mind it—that meant he had succeeded.

"You could be a surgeon, or a lab technician."

"But if I become a doctor, there'd be two Dr. Josef Ludwig in this house. Wouldn't that bother you?" Josef rose his eyes to look at him.

"Are you kidding? I would be so proud. 'Ludwig & Son'. Doesn't it sound good?"

Josef's eyes turned to the book in his hands. "I guess so..."

Doctor Josef Ludwig Junior...Surgeon. Family doctor. Investigator of diseases. Reconstructor.

As crazy as it sounded, the idea was appealing to him. He saw himself playing with bodies like he usually played with sand: modelling them at his whim, turning the ugly into beautiful, correcting Nature's mistakes, discovering new diseases and unleashing them upon those jerks from school who called him 'four-eyes'...Turning them into monsters!

With the book close to his heart, he returned to the shed where Herr Potthast kept his gardening tools. Under a potato sack he kept the Osswalds' dog's corpse, away from curious eyes, until he found a better place to hide it. Klara was a filthy snitch. He had cut the mutt open and taken out the intestines, not only glad to have found a subject to satisfy his curiosity, but also the chance to get rid of that annoying piece of crap which seemed to have it in for him once and for all. He wondered how it would bark at him again with no vocal cords!

But now the thrill was gone. He left the dog aside and looked at the book. He cleaned his hands before touching it, so he didn't stain it with blood, and glanced through some pages. The human body seemed way more interesting than animal's. Perhaps being a doctor and operate people wasn't such a bad perspective.

He had to admit Father had had a great idea.