Evocative Object
Micro-essay 1. Assignment for Nancy Sommers’ Creative Writing Workshop. Harvard University.
It was a cold, wet, and generally gray afternoon in Moscow; the Red Square stood right behind me. I was alone, feeling awkward and in many ways regretting my decision to stay for 3 nights on my way to South Korea. There was a colorful street market display, nothing big, just a few tables and no more than a dozen merchants, and as my eyes skimmed through the merchandise, I see it, in a little table filled with porcelain figures including some royalty looking white dogs—those likely owned by grandmas or single aunts—, a fawn French Bulldog cough my eye. A 6-inch long figurine looking at me with sad puppy eyes. Out of over 350 recognized dog breeds, and more so, out of 16 colors of French Bulldogs, the artist, who signed her piece with an A and an L, molded a Frenchie, and painted it fawn. The why of this strange and not commercially intuitive selection, I’ll never know. Perhaps the artist had one, or perhaps they met one and thought they were cute or funny-looking.
It was a statuette of my dog! I had to have it… But I also liked it. It looked good in my apartment, 6.000 miles away from where I got it, and I set it on my TV station, right next to books and a small box made with old chunky keyboard buttons. I took the figurine with me to 2 cities and 4 different houses, through a master’s degree and 2 toxic boyfriends. The figurine has been on my postal code more times than Maya. Truth is, for at least three years, I liked the figurine better than my own dog.
She was hyperactive, ruined most of my furniture, and jumped like crazy. I knew better than to mistreat her; I had strong instructions about what dogs (innocent and magical creatures) deserved from us, so I took good care of her, pet her constantly, and I loved her, I really did love her, even though I neither liked her nor enjoyed her company.
As the years went by, and after finally being able to move her from the countryside to live in Caracas with me, she looked more and more like the figurine; she sleeps most of the day, she is very quiet, and after losing her companion, a white Frenchie called Pinky Brewster, she now has the same melancholic eyes. Was the figurine a prophecy of her future? Sad, out of shape, and lifeless… or was it a prophecy of mine?
As I carry this fragile object in my hand feeling sorry for myself, with Maya—my depressed female dog that I now like so much—laying down next to my feet, touching the sleekness of the porcelain, I feel a little bulk on the figurine’s lower belly, and I now discover, 7 years later, that what it was made to resemble, was a male dog.