Sparkling Creature - Part I
“To be a muse was to transcend immediate utility. A muse was the prologue to the inception of art. An open mouth before a song came out. To be a muse was to be All-that-is-Holy. A stalwart in the annihilation of the profane. Akin to being God itself.”
So says Hanneli, the narrator of Swati Sudarsan’s stunning short story, “Sparkling Creature.” Hanneli is a gallery girl who’s adrift in her life, wanting “to find a portal to euphoria.”
For her, becoming a muse should open such a portal. In her search for such fulfillment, though, Hanneli betrays deeper unease about art, capitalism, and sexuality. This story is propulsively narrated and brims over with biting insight on the art world.
-Michael
“And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”
-The Second Coming, William Butler Yeats
The night I met Giancarlo, I woke up with the moon on my mind. Her capricious nature. Her tides and her sway. How after the waning phases, she always rebuilt back into herself. How everything depended on everything else to function. I blinked past my cheap plastic furniture, translucent and pearl-like in the glow of my ceiling light, and tried to see myself reflected back in the moon. In my grime-resined window, I saw that she was nearly full. Only a dark sliver still absconded by the tilt of the Earth. Far away and lonely in the cloudless dome of night.
*****
I worked as a gallery girl. Night shifts, when the titans of the art world conglomerated, making lucrative deals over champagne. The gallery girls were me, Yvonne, and Natalia. Cherie, our boss, told us she had hired us because we looked like Charlie’s Angels. “Something to please everyone,” she would say, lining us up in order of blonde, bottle-dyed red, and Asian. She thought this aesthetic argument would distract us from the truth of her fantasy. She wanted to be our faceless, nameless, all-powerful keeper. She was a very plain woman born into great wealth. If she couldn’t be beautiful, then she wanted total command over All-of-Beauty. She barked orders at us, like, “Show me graceful necks and stuttering walks!” and “No one ever sold art by having an opinion about it!” She was militant about her rules. We could only wear black. We were not to show up the art in any way. We were to adulate the art and their creators, even if they were predators or perverts. Especially if they were predators or perverts. Those without morals were the wealthiest, and at the end of the day, we were there to facilitate the flow of money, even if we were paid crumbs.
None of this bothered Yvonne and Natalia, who were masterly at the job. They erupted into giggles at the driest of jokes. They had perfected the “oh!” of astonishment at trite industry gossip. They managed to somehow blend into the background while also enhancing the aesthetics of the gallery with their dewy faces and glossy tresses. Cherie picked on me the hardest, but she rationalized by saying I was lucky she paid me so much attention. It stroked her ego to think of herself as the one who had opened doors for me, the only woman of color in the zip code. If not for the goodness of her heart, I would probably be working in fast food somewhere.
Of course she was correct, but it didn’t mean I should let her own my mind. Every time she called me the Asian Angel, I erased the image of a sleek, sexbot saleswoman from my head, and instead imagined Botticelli’s Three Graces: Me, Yvonne, and Natalia transformed into uniformly diaphanous beings — sensual, pure, and entwined. In my head, we danced through Cherie’s commands, our movements constructing an entire world outside of her. She would try to penetrate this reverie, but we were self-contained and elusive, even while we were on full display. The art could be touched, but we existed in our plane. It would have driven her crazy.
*****
The night I met Giancarlo, it took longer than usual for the windshield wiper of my brain to activate. I went through my usual routine. A hot shower, long enough to generate a thick steam that collected on my walls and cleaned them as the water dripped down. My floor was sandy beneath my feet, and with my bare hands, I wiped the mirror to observe my face. What I saw was desultory, beautiful, and mine.
These affirmations helped me surmount the reality of being a gallery girl, which was humiliating yet flattering. Everywhere I went, arms would graze me. The men attached to them engulfed me into their circles. “Where are you going with all those drinks?” they would laugh, plucking flutes from my platter, looking at me with the same lewd expressions they looked at the prints of invariably horsey women splayed around rocks in nature, their crudeness neutered by strange apertures and shadows. The men displayed these prints in the homes they shared with their girlfriends, who somehow had been deluded into believing this was “an elevated engagement with feminism.” I could have gone home with any of them, and sometimes I did. Yvonne and Natalia were satisfied, waiting for one to claim them as his wife. But I was underwhelmed, because I wanted something more ineffable.
I wanted to become a muse.
However, I had my own ideas of what a muse should be. The women in those portraits were not muses. They were objects. Props at best. To be a muse was to transcend immediate utility. A muse was the prologue to the inception of art. An open mouth before a song came out. To be a muse was to be All-that-is-Holy. A stalwart in the annihilation of the profane. Akin to being God itself.
But this quest had proven difficult because I had very strict parameters for my artist. I wasn’t interested in becoming a muse to someone old and established. I needed my artist to be able to produce a career’s worth of art inspired solely by me. Ideally, my artist would be attractive, so my own beauty would seem natural and not make any statements on its own. However, I could not have tolerated it if my artist was more attractive than me. Such competition would arouse my vicious jealousies, and I needed serenity to maintain my allure. Finally, I wanted an artist who was interested in sex with me, but who was more so fascinated by my sensuality. Otherwise, sex could become a great mechanism of control. I feared this. Without my whim, my ability to inspire would wither. Then I would no longer be a capable muse.
In the last conversation I’d had with my mother, she had asked, “What do you get out of this job? Escapism?”
Leave it to my mother to accuse me of striving for the same thing that had eluded her. She was a jealous woman who took out her frustrations on me, deflecting self-reflection and emotional regulation in favor of cruel criticisms. To her, perfectionism was an escape, but ultimately, both were unattainable. For this, she was aggrieved. Rather than face her pain, she wanted to be far away from the disappointments of her life, but reality always came crashing back down onto her. She was a hoarder, veering toward bed-bound due to her worsening health. It had been like this since my father left. When I was young, we joked that he was “lost at sea.” In truth, my mother was lost within herself, and it peeved her that she could not sweep me away with her. This was her definition of disloyalty.
Also, my mother was wrong. The job was not merely an escape, it was transcendence. My chance to construct a new reality. I wanted to find a portal to euphoria. And this required opening doors, walking through them. Sometimes I found this euphoria, fleetingly. Other times, I felt I had been dropped into the wrong scene of a play. I had to walk back out. Because this was not a play. This was my life.
*****
The night I met Giancarlo, I cried as I walked to work. The moon was so bright it was almost sonic. There was a bus that could have gotten me to work in seven minutes, but I would rather save the money. My eyes grew puffy. Now I was the same monstrous beauty as my surroundings. Yet, I never felt like an imposter in my life. My mother always said, “Those who come from nothing are nothing.” I fought that sentiment with every fiber of my being. I had a grandiose sense of self, which thwarted me from being able to see myself clearly. My mother had only ever been able to understand me through her own desires, so she thought I wanted to find an artist who would bring me fame and success. But the limelight was not what I sought. It was something softer, more akin to a sense of belonging. Thus, I needed a particular type of artist. Someone who was not just lonely, but vehemently bored by everyday angst and underwhelmed by the corruption of the masses. Someone who was occupied by concepts like absolution and transcendence as much as I was. See, this wasn’t just a search for an artist. It was a search to grout the gaping holes in my psyche.
*****
Before I met Giancarlo, I had wondered if the gallery was the right place to achieve my dream of becoming a muse. Here I was losing my ability to feel anything, even numbness. Perhaps it was by my own doing. I had always shed people like a sport. Fucking off was my religion. I loved being the master of reinventing my own fate. I cast off boyfriends and girlfriends easily. I had no attachments to material belongings, and happily sold my entire closet regularly. Maybe this was the only way I could feel rich. Knowing I had something to discard.
Even last week, I had shed my only friend group. The last vestige leftover from college. They were a standard deviation above me in social class, and when I met them, I had wanted to be a social-climber. I had been inspired by the fact that none of them needed to work. They were trust fund babies. Girls who barely registered the meaning of a “budget” or “window shopping.” These were girls that were taken seriously at designer stores, who radiated the glossiness that came from making wellness into a lifestyle. But then, they all went on to acquire vanity jobs. It was their way of engaging with feminism and utilitarianism. The concept of working to live was alien to them. My lifestyle, the hustle of it, was unbelievable to them. I couldn’t bear to tell them the whole truth about myself. They thought I worked at the art gallery because I loved the art, which was hilarious. Working for financial reasons never crossed their mind, and they didn’t know enough about my life to see that the gallery was tasteless and unoriginal. I worked there for the potential of who I could become, who I could meet. This type of risk-taking was seldom on their mind, because they could just buy whatever they wanted. After all, they lived to indulge in intense hedonism.
Yet reality was crystalizing, and it was during our last brunch that I had a spiritual awakening. I left my body and got a bird’s eye view of my life. The effect it had on me was profound, but moreover, it was embarrassing. I saw myself through these girls. Like them, I had no impulse towards a personality. I too had become insufferable, conceited, and righteously ignorant. These girls were obsessed with comparing their companies’ policies on ideological conflicts around the world, happy to adopt canned Libertarian phrases as their own moral framework. I partook. There was an artistry to the way they could worm ourselves out of basic critical thinking. I saw it now. I was sitting in a group of bulimics, all of us chugging iced-down mimosas like we were trying to rip a hole through our stomachs. Life had stagnated for them. Even two years after graduation, they hung out a minimum of four times a week, eating to the point of discomfort, then complaining about indigestion while we took turns going to the bathroom to throw up. In between trips to the bathroom, we sucked on ice cubes and pontificated on each other’s flaws. We passed it off as casual concern for one another, but really it was verbal sparring. There was a hostility to it, a real charge, but something deep in me had always felt deeply mothered by it.
“Poor thing, have you been getting enough sleep? Those circles under your eyes have really deepened,” Delinda said, her giant nostrils giving her a natural look of contempt.
Before I could answer, Marcel chimed in, “It’s despicable, what capitalism does to our bodies. We aren’t meant to inhabit a society that chains our essential value to productivity. It disorients the brain. I was thinking of booking a trip to space, to experience my essential value in zero gravity.”
What had kept me here for so long? Perhaps because there was one part of the meal that gave me intense intellectual satisfaction. I could never participate, but every brunch, each girl shared a new luxury item, in a show-and-tell that made them feel self-important, having “discovered” some product that was equally as cutting-edge as it was ludicrous. It didn’t matter what it was, as long as it was something completely original. In some ways, each brunch was like being at a gallery.
At the brunch I discarded them, Marcel brought intuitive skin tint, Theodora brought a TSA-approved charging Birkin, and Delinda brought her newly purchased compost-collecting shower head. She pulled the shiny brass head from her bag and unscrewed the caulky end that went into the wall, showing where it stowed the fluoride and debris from her shower water.
“I might use this to make you all matching candles or soap,” she said.
Gemma passed around a vape pen that changed colors with your mood. It was pastel pink in her hands. Cerulean in Theodora’s. Periwinkle in Marcel’s. Delinda grabbed it from her. A violent orange. She shoved it my way, but I shoved it back. I didn’t want them to see my color.
“Come, Hanneli, we all tried it!” Delinda whined.
“Let’s see what you’re feeling!” Theodora cried.
“Try it, try it, try it!” the girls all chimed together, then placed it against my closed fist. It transformed into an obscene yellow-green.
“Eww!” Delinda squealed.
Something in her tone. The push and the pull of making me do something, just so they could judge it. I heard my mother, and I snapped. I took the vape, and shoved it up Delinda’s gigantic nostril. Gemma’s jaw dropped open. Theodora’s lower lip quivered. When Delinda’s nose began to gush blood, I shoved the table away. It toppled over, and I ran out.
To be continued…
Swati Sudarsan is an Indian-American writer who grew up in the Midwest. She was longlisted for the Granum Foundation Prize in 2024 for her novel-in-progress and is a 2025 Periplus fellow. She has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Her work is published in The Rumpus, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, Catapult, Denver Quarterly, and more. She received the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference Katharine Bakeless Nason Award, and has received funding and support from the Tin House Workshop, the Kenyon Review, and the Sewanee Writers' Conference. She now lives in Brooklyn with her black cat Toothless.
Follow her on Instagram and read more of her work here.