Volume 1 THE VOLATILIZED CEILING OF BARON MUNODIRikki DucornetRikki Ducornet is one of the foremost surrealists of her generation, with short fiction appearing in dozens of literary magazines. Her critically acclaimed novels include Netsuke and The Fountains of Neptune.The museums of Europe keep curious portraits illustrating the assumption that the body gives the soul its shape. Da Vinci imagined a woman with a monkey’s face, Rubens human lions, Delia Porta a man with the profile of a ram. I myself am albino; I look like an angel and so inspire acute passions. Longing for a purifying fire, men would defile me, or, taking pleasure, be absolved of sin. If I have never shared their fevers, it is because a woman has stolen my heart. Black and clairvoyant, she claims that one day the world will shrivel in the sun like a plum. However, this is not the story of our love affair, but of an obsession justified by my friend’s bleak vision. Like my love for her, it has withstood the teeth of time.One evening in the early 1700s and shortly before the tragedy which was to deny the promise of Eden, the Baron Munodi described for his little son those metal mirrors made of four isosceles triangles once cherished by the Greeks.
