Sparkling Creature - Part IV
In Part III, Hanneli leaves the gallery with Giancarlo and goes with him back to his place. As they begin to get intimate, she tells him that he must also take her as his muse, and he agrees. Read Part IV to see how it ends.
Giancarlo could have chosen anywhere for the photoshoot. But he chose a particular hotel in a particular neighborhood, and a particular outfit for me to wear. He had been indignant when I suggested any alternative. So, I went to work with my black uniform over the outfit. I had looked for Ross that night, a beacon of comfort, but I couldn’t find him. So at the end of the shift, I hid in the bathroom until Cherie, Yvonne, and Natalia left, and then stripped off my uniform to reveal a blue polyester corset with patent black hotpants, fishnet stockings rolling out from the shorts, and over-the-knee boots with a long, pointy gold heel.
I looked at myself in the mirror of the bathroom while doing my makeup. Giancarlo had left me to choose my own makeup and hair, but it was obvious that anything that didn’t scream pin-up sex doll was discordant with the outfit. So I drew on winged eyeliner to widen my eyes, powdered away my features, and smeared red lipstick around my lips until the layers began to accumulate, ballooning my lips into something cartoonishly fuckable. I looked obscene, but of a coherent vision.
I walked to the hotel, and the moon above me was raging in the power of her fullness, despite the sky beginning to turn pink with the first hunch of dawn. I had been surprised how few emotions had been involved in sex with Giancarlo. After he had taken my clothes off, but before he had slid into me, he had picked me up and bounced me up and down. I felt like a prize pig being weighed for slaughter, which was furthered when he moved each of my limbs around, one by one, to see its flexibility. He evaluated me like I was made of cuts of meat, each individually valuable. He ultimately decided I was worthy enough to penetrate. While he was inside me, I found myself using most of my energy to say things meant to turn him on, because I wanted him to finish faster. I was eager to get to the next part, where I got to become the muse.
Now I couldn’t help but wonder if Giancarlo had understood me enough to dominate my psyche. If so, he was a genius. I had been completely reliant on him to direct me toward confidence. I had realized far too late that by having sex with him, I had given away any power I had in my arsenal. Now I was discardable, and moreover, I was exhausted. At least I could trust my excessive makeup to cover the bruised blue under my eyes with makeup.
*****
The hotel was discreet, a door poking out of a wall, but inside it was opulent. I waited in the lobby, which was covered in dark wood panels and gold sconces. At first, I felt shy in my outfit, but after an hour passed, and then another, I lost my will toward dignity. I became loose, splaying around on the chairs of the lobby. I was getting sleepy, so I asked the concierge for a glass of water, and then another. Each person that walked into the hotel looked at me for a moment, as if contemplating me, pricing me. I knew I looked ready to be bought. After another hour, my head began to jerk around as I fell into microsleeps. Sleeping in the lobby was a sure-fire way to get kicked out, so I got up to wander the hotel. I walked to the elevator and hit every single button. I began to explore.
*****
On floor one, there were long dark hallways, and grotty carpeting that had obviously cost a lot of money. There were empty glass cases on every inch of wall. On floor two, I found a rotary phone next to a shelf of books that had no titles, and phone numbers plastered underneath the tables. On floor three, there were hundreds of shredded Victorian toys, looking both haunted and fed up. When I got to floor eight, I found a large round room covered in framed mirrors. Some were small, others misshapen, and some were on the ceiling or shattered on the floor. The effect was such that I felt I was floating above myself. I saw my monstrous beauty, reflected back to me. The face I saw every day. Desultory, beautiful, and mine. Yet facing myself, wearing the lurid outfit Giancarlo had picked out, I felt like I was meeting myself for the first time. I was immediately repulsed. I couldn’t bear to acknowledge that me, in this room, at this moment in time, was real.
I hurried out of the room, pushing open the first door I could get my hands on. I was met with immediate relief. As if implanted from the depths of my most sincere desires, was a giant conference room full of empty mattresses, each elevated to hip level with chairs. It looked like something one of the artists at our gallery might concoct as a statement on the rest economy, or perhaps a seance. The mattresses looked so soft. I could use some softness, I thought. I got on one.
*****
I woke up to a gentle hand on my shoulder, subtle as a gossamer wisp. Given how deeply I had been asleep, it was a miracle I even woke up.
“Hanneli. Ha. Nel. Li.”
I fluttered my eyes open.
A familiar face. Misshapen earlobes. Hair nostrils.
“Ross?”
I was met with a moment of relief that maybe I had been at work this whole time, and Giancarlo had not stood me up after all. I lifted my neck, and saw I was in the hotel room. Mattresses everywhere, but now there were ruffled sheets on them. They looked like they could still be warm.
“I didn’t know you practiced sexual healing,” Ross said.
He looked at me with such pride, in a way no one ever had. Not my mother, not Cherie.
There was a sign in the corner. SEXUAL HEALING CONFERENCE.
I blinked.
“I have to kick you out now, but the rest of the conference is out in the lobby, eating their post-healing meals. I’ll be in the catering room. Go celebrate yourself!”
He pulled me off the bed, and I stumbled out into the hall. My phone was dead. I should have run down to check if Giancarlo had arrived, but my body felt frail. My mind was faint, like it had been erased by sleep. I kept walking. I smelled the food before I saw it. Carts and carts of sandwiches, kebabs, pastries, and rolls. There was a cart of salads, a cart of dips, and at the end of the hallway was a cart holding a giant cake. It had three layers, was a garish purple, and in yellow cursive said, “CONGRATS ON YOUR SEXUAL HEALING”.
I could pass as sexually healed, I thought. I could take the food. Who could these conference attendees be? Perverted men, visibly anguished by their own deviancy? Frigid women who were so afraid to express a single need that they were in danger of fading into dust? I could name something wrong with me too.
As if I had conjured them, a tidal wave of people rolled out. There were men and women, even children, all in ordinary clothes, all organized into family units. They held each other’s hands. I was crushed by how normal they looked. Not like broken, sexual perverts who needed to seek entire communities with the same problem in order to reach a modicum of hope for absolution and transcendence. They didn’t share in my crime of desiring too much from the world.
“That was beautiful,” I heard someone say. A father patted a little girl on her head, and kissed her forehead. “You have so much to look forward to.”
The attendees got in line with their plates, getting food to nourish themselves. Seeing them with their abundant plates snapped something in my body, like a dead car revived with a jumper cable. I suddenly felt the full force of my appetite, a potent beast raging inside me. I felt as if I hadn’t eaten in days, or ever. Maybe I did not understand the true nature of satiation. Maybe I had been empty since I first started going to friend brunches, or when my father was lost at sea, or even since the day I was born, when I became my mother’s child. I had been living past an emptiness I never realized was inside me. It wasn’t the starvation of the brunches, or all the food I was never allowed to touch in the gallery. The emptiness came from somewhere deeper, permeating into my hopes, into my very way of thinking.
An urge to cry brewed in me, but underneath that, I wanted something else too. I wanted to be exposed for the truth of myself. For whom I believed myself to be. My body couldn’t hold it anymore. I had come from nothing, was destined for nothing. Cherie might as well fire me. I was only worth something when I could convince others of my worth. I had no essential value. If Ross came back, I would confess this to him. I could trust him to let me be right about myself for once. He would let me say these horrible truths as I got the only thing I wanted, to suck on his arm as he rocked me back and forth.
I turned back to the hall to go to him, when a photo on a wall caught my eye. It was of a building, looking masculine and vulnerable. It was unmistakably the same one I had seen at the gallery. Giancarlo’s. There was only one thing to do now. I would rip his name off the plaque, discard him the way I did with everything.
But on the plaque was a different name. Armando Maticello, 1934-2011.
I stepped backward, flummoxed. Giancarlo was a fraud. A full body heat rose in me from the humiliation of not realizing. I wish I had been born into the world of art. I would have detected an artist with a feeling in my bones, without needing to carefully and tediously study their names. I really was useless. Worse, an imposter.
I took another step back.
All those years in the gallery had added to nothing.
Another step.
I was a fool, and if Cherie had fired me, it would have been a kindness.
I took one more step back, and I felt my body catch on something.
The world disappeared into an impenetrable black.
I passed through my final portal.
*****
It would have been a small mercy if I had died, but instead I blinked. I was still conscious, but my eyes were glued shut. I could only open my mouth. It was delicious. So I kept licking and blinking, though it stung. I remembered I had limbs, so I used them to wipe my eyes. My hands were covered in purple. My entire body too. On my chest were the words “SEX” and “HEAL”. I looked up, and saw the remnants of a gutted cake. The icing was my new outfit. In the background was a scream.
Then a rush.
Men, women and children, gathering around me, working feverishly to get out their phones. The eyes of their camera phones rapidly blinked at me. Click. Hundreds of photos were being taken of me from every angle. Click. I was the center of the world. Click. No one could get enough of me. Click. I thought of my friends, gearing for brunch. I forgave them for their lack of imagination. Click. Everyone around. I wondered if they could really capture me as I was. As I felt it. Click. Could they capture it as they felt it? Click. Collective reality was shifting, and the gaping hole of my psyche was plugged up. Click. I had this silly thought, that perhaps my entire life hadn’t been lackluster. Click. Perhaps I was a sparkling creature, at the beginning of my life.
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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