"We perform autopsies to kill ghosts" said the forensic pathologist to her apprentice during the last night of his training, and it was the first non-technical observation he had ever heard from her. She gestured to him to continue his smooth disassembly of the dead man they were working on. "People worry about diseases or fear murderers but they are only truly haunted by what they don't understand. We cut up corpses to find an explanation that can be understood and accepted. We pull apart and file away death so when people bury their dead they don't come back." Her apprentice nodded without understanding. She had selected this corpse for his final test. After this he would be qualified to work on his own. Why he had chosen this job he had never needed to understand either.
"Why do you think I picked this case for tonight?"
The apprentice frowned. "I don't know," he said, for he was honest about professional matters. "It seems like a clear case so far. Am I wrong?"
"No, you're not. What is this?" The forensic pathologist pointed at a feature inside the opened-up corpse. The apprentice answered with puzzled clarity. "Yes. And this?" Another obvious feature, another obvious answer. One distracted by something persistently tugging at his attention from near the base of the corpse's skull.
"And this?"
The apprentice's eye focused where his intuition had been screaming at him to look at. "I don't know," he said. His teacher contradicted him with a look. "Alright, I know," he said. "But it's impossible." The apprentice looked at her. "Is this some sort of hazing?" Somehow that felt even more impossible, coming from her, than what was inside the corpse.
"No," she said. Activating the voice recorder, she described something that was not what they were seeing. He had heard and read similar words many times. Never while looking at what he had assumed they were describing.
The forensic pathologist turned off the recorder. "We give people explanations that can be understood and accepted," she said again, looking at him with eyes he knew missed nothing. There were next to her hands things that weren't, technically, knives.
He sighed. How could he be so tired, he wondered, when he began his true career a few minutes ago? He pointed at the voice recorder. "We bury what would haunt them." After a few seconds of silence. "What about us?"
"Mostly? We work alone and live alone," said the forensic pathologist to her colleague. "And," nodding to the corpse of the forensic pathologist lying on the autopsy table, a suicide that hadn't been a suicide and would be reported as a third, different thing, "we are there for each other when we die."