Sparkling Creature - Part II
Hanneli is a gallery girl aching for something bigger: she longs to become an artist’s muse. In Part I, we learned about her shape-shifting personality, her mother’s contempt and father “away at sea.” A spiritual awakening at brunch causes her to shove a vape pen up her friend Delinda’s nose and run off.
The night I met Giancarlo, there was an itching under my skin, almost like burning. This itching lacerated me with a dull and throbbing vengeance. It was a migraine, crawling through networks of organs, festering like a cancer.
I tried to focus on work. Once a month, the gallery changed out their displays, and that night the room was full of new installments. I didn’t recognize any of the artists’ names. We switched exhibits fast enough anyway that it never mattered if I learned them or not. Cherie focused on perpetual novelty, rather than canonized legitimacy. Our gallery was arranged into rooms, and each one was supposed to conjure a specific atmosphere. Where I was stationed, the room was sleek and futuristic. Fluorescent lights in a demure yellow-tone injected a sense of alertness and optimism, so that one was filled with hope as they gazed at the newest exhibit: “Art as a Weapon Toward Peace.” A crew had come in earlier that day to install a full spread of 3-D printed objects common in war, reimagined as artist’s tools. All the pieces were artillery, guns, and bazookas made into easels, canvases, rulers, and palette knives. There were hand grenades holding shades of paint, and a miniature tank with paint brushes stuffed into the wheels. It reminded me of the strange, useless objects my friends showed off at brunch. I thought about how it felt to shove that vape pen up Delinda’s nose, and wondered if my friends would have anything to say to me. My eyes kept watering. I walked around the gallery, through the opulent blue room, into the meditation chambers where lucrative deals were quietly made, and around the mirrored room where tiny art objects became amplified. I walked down the escape stairwell, which was dark and steep, with only glowing red lights to guide the way down. Not even the peace of darkness could neuter the urge to leave my life. Quitting my friend group, telling them how I really felt, had been a drug. Was I addicted to sabotaging my own life?
The problem was, there wasn’t much left to destroy. All I had left was my job, but I needed the money. My mother had cut me out of her will years ago, preferring to leave what was left of her 401k to a corporate church in her neighborhood. Besides, my gig as a gallery girl had been hard won. During interviews, I had plucked off the other candidates like a jousting match. I had been motivated, almost pathologically, because for the first time, I was better than other people. If I got the job, it would mean I had convinced someone else of my elegance and my worth. Even if it meant that I was commodifiable, at least I was an asset.
But now, I wondered if I had asked for too much from this life. I touched my hand to the walls, which looked pristine and flawless under the deep red glow of the bulbs. The air was warm, almost pulsing. Perhaps it was the relentless nature of my yearning that was the root of my disillusionment. No one ever talked about the tedium of holding on to hope. The drudgery of keeping a positive attitude.
As my hand traced along, I realized there was graffiti on the wall written in permanent marker. The light was so effective at erasing flaws that I almost hadn’t seen it. I must have looked perfect too, tracing the words, reading them:
Caution: slick throbbing wet dripping paint
Eat my cASSerole
The revolution is for display purposes only
I never finish anyth—
I wondered how my life would go if I quit the job tonight. Probably, I would spend the next few weeks holed up in my dirty apartment, with no friends to motivate me to leave. My mother wouldn’t call me, and I would feel the weight of my loneliness pressing on my chest at night like a terrifying succubus. I would increasingly have less and less motivation to get up from my bed, which would start to discolor from my sweat seeping into it. I would order food in, until I ran out of money, and then I would have to move back in with my mother. Was that better than my life now? But staying here made me lose my ability to feel anything, even numbness.
*****
I was in this strange state of mind, between petulant and despairing, when Cherie pulled me aside at the early evening part of the shift.
“Can you not tone it down?” she asked, pointing at my lips.
“I’m not wearing anything,” I said, and she shook her head.
“You look like a blow-job doll.”
Of course the volume of my lips bothered her. Cherie hated anything that was not sleek and svelte. She wanted smooth surfaces, and shiny, inoffensive objects everywhere. The aesthetics of submission.
“I’m stressed, Hanneli. I need the money to move tonight. I’ve got all these exciting, new deep-cut artists on display. Big risks and big payoffs.”
Her cheeks were flaming red. A bead of sweat was threatening to roll down her forehead.
“It is imperative that you do everything I say. For charity! A cut of tonight’s proceeds will go to this amazing organization I found.”
She pulled out her phone and held the screen close to my face, like I was too stupid to see. It read: National Society Against the Belittlement of Women - Taking Action to Discourage and Disparage Acts of Humiliation Against Women.
“They work around the clock to counter acts of humiliation against women. This is the fifth wave of feminism. We have to sell well tonight so I get invited to their fundraising gala. You won’t believe the connections I could make there. But they’ll only invite me if our donations are substantially generous.”
She panted at me, her grey eyes wide and beseeching.
“It sounds like a front for a Ponzi scheme,” I said.
Cherie looked at me like I had suggested everyone in the gallery should be dead. She grabbed my arm so tightly that I could feel my circulation being cut off.
“What’s your problem, Hanneli? Do you hate women? Charity?”
“No. I just didn’t realize you knew what humanitarianism was.”
The color drained from her face.
“Let’s see if I keep you on after tonight.”
“You’d be doing me a great big favor!”
We were at each other’s necks when a man came out from the swinging doors to the back kitchen. He had a solid elegance to him, despite his misshapen earlobes and nostril hairs. Perhaps it was because of his massive arms, which overstretched the sleeves of his shirt. His arms were covered in tiny white bumps, but as he came closer, his scent engulfed me. It was rotten and sweet at the same time, and I couldn’t stop smelling it. It made me want to unfold my lips onto his arms. To suck his skin smooth. I wanted to leave a hickey on him, claim that arm as my own.
He pulled Cherie to the side with the same arm that entranced me. He murmured something to her, and she nodded dolefully. Then she walked away. When she was gone, the man from the kitchen turned to me and pulled me into the room he had come from. When we got inside, he moved a tray of champagne flutes and crudites, and motioned for me to sit on the table. I sat with my legs closed, my arms folded in my lap. I felt like a little girl.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
“She threatened to fire me.”
“She would never.”
I looked around the room. There were cutting boards all over the surfaces, and men pummeling bottle openers into wine bottle corks, pouring methodically into rows of wine glasses.
“I’ve never been to this part of the gallery before.”
“That’s because she’s scared of us back here.”
“Why?”
“We’re ugly. We cheapen the art. But at the same time, she needs us. So she doesn’t know how to act around us.”
“Better than her bullying you.”
“She bullies because she wants to have a bigger say in the world. She wants to have been worth something.”
“She wants to shift collective reality, but deep down, she knows all the art she curates has no perspective.”
“It’s made to be sellable. The more sellable, the more she can keep selling.”
I looked at him, astonished. No one at the gallery had ever said something I agreed with before.
“Ross,” he said, reading my mind.
“Hanneli.”
*****
Ross gave me a warm compress to calm my nerves and an ice pack for my watering eyes before he sent me out. It was almost like survivor’s guilt, leaving him alone back there, but the second round of service was going to begin. The early crowd had left, and the late night patrons were here now. They were younger and trendier than the evening crowd. The transition had to be seamless. I washed my hands. I arranged napkins, careful not to let the lingering wet of my hands mar them. I walked through all the rooms of the gallery, spritzing our house perfume into each room. The blue room, the meditation room, the mirror room, and the stairwell. It all looked different to me now. I felt lighter in them, bouncier. The scent I was spraying had been specially formulated by a perfumier to deactivate the inhibition centers of the brain. To loosen everyone’s wallets.
When I was done, I took my place next to Yvonne and Natalia. Cherie cued shoegaze music, and the new patrons filed in. She lifted her hands like the conductor of an orchestra, and signaled for us girls to take our trays of wine out.
“The gallery does not cater to the masses!” Yvonne said like a battle cry.
“We serve the distinguished!” Natalia said, pumping her fist.
We carried the trays out ceremoniously, like a changing of the guard. The entire gallery’s volume dimmed and people shushed to see which way we were going. The trays emptied quickly in the mad grab for the glasses. Booze was the only thing people truly wanted from an art show.
As I walked around, I noticed a small installation in the corner I had not seen before. It was a display of photographs. Buildings were shot from articulate angles that made them appear at once masculine and vulnerable. These alternated with images of women in boudoir. Next to those was a“No Smoking” sign. Underneath, a man stood smoking. I made eye contact with him, and pointed at the sign.
“I thought it was part of the art,” he chuckled.
It was rare in the gallery to be this unserious. I wondered if he was anyone special. He looked exactly like every other artist I knew — wiry, sharp features, with a boyish mop of dark hair. However, his shirt had visible sweat stains, and he looked disheveled. He had to be a big name artist. No one else would have the gall to show up like this. He snuffed out his cigarette on the wall, under one of the photographs of buildings.
“Do you like this?” he asked, pointing at the photographs.
I looked at the buildings again, and the women sandwiched between them. Visually they were the same size, lending a feeling that these hypersexualized women were towering over the viewer. The colors were garish. Saccharine yellows and cherry reds.
“I think I am intrigued. Or perhaps confused. But I cannot look away.”
He smiled demurely.
“Why? Are these yours?” I asked, half joking.
His smile widened, and I gasped. A sudden remorse came over me, that I had not taken the time to know which artists had been curated for tonight, or ever. I wished I knew him. I wanted to know him. I looked at his photographs again. I wanted to feel something definitive for them, but I couldn’t move past the disorientation. Maybe this was what it meant to be an original. Good art was never straightforward, was it? The idea made my nipples perk and my mouth go dry.
“What is your name?” I asked.
“Giancarlo.”
He said it without an Italian accent, which made it sound even more foreign.
“What brought you to art?” I asked him.
“Maybe the vision of it all? That it looks somewhere other than right here. Right now.”
I could cry. It was the idea of vision that attracted me to the art world in the first place. It had always been obvious to me when someone had vision, and painful to me when they did not. Vision did something to my brain, snapped synapses into place with the resounding penetration of a struck triangle. But something about my role at the gallery had mutated the purity of my awe into something selfish. Perhaps I had been in some sort of withdrawal from real creativity, shaky and delirious from my inability to figure out what all this fucking art was trying to say.
I looked around again. Everyone was in their places, chattering and sipping their champagne. My life was on the cusp of changing now, I could feel it. It was flabbergasting that no one else seemed affected. It was as if a giant boulder had appeared in the middle of the gallery that no one acknowledged.
“After your shift, want to get a drink?” he asked.
To be continued…
Swati Sudarsan is a writer from Michigan, now based in Brooklyn on unceded Lenape land. She is a 2025 Asian American Writers' Workshop Margins Fellow, 2025 Periplus Fellow, and 2023 winner of the Bread Loaf Katharine Bakeless Nason Award. She is at work on a novel, which was longlisted for the Granum Prize in 2024. Her work is interested in both the burden and beauty of inhabiting a feminine body in the world. She is a Libra.
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