Flickering

The Flickering are a kind of magical mother described in Wanda White's book, A Field Guide to Magical Women: A Mythical Ethnography. These are mothers who appear and disappear at will, some fading in and out, always there in the right light, at the right angle, but often translucent, while others take on more of a coyote quality, showing up unexpectedly in the corner of a room, or disappearing at the precise moment they are needed. White considered them to be nearly extinct, yet there were still random reports of them around the world.

The Flickering in Wanda White's Account

White's account includes a mother in Buffalo who was reported to fade away just after bedtime. Her children claimed they could find her nowhere when they rose from bed for a glass of water, or else could see only her shadow as it moved always one room ahead of them, flitting from wall to wall, eternally elusive. Their mother reported she did feel not "altogether there" in the evenings, after long days spent with her four children, cooking and cleaning and ironing and bathing and singing and dancing and hiking and romping. White pondered whether the mind-body connection might be so strong that these women are in fact able to disintegrate their physical selves via intense maternal ennui, though she herself thought not, for the motivating maternal impulse is toward creation rather than destruction. She challenged both the reader and herself to consider the Flickering within a transformational framework, in order to undertake the profound philosophical work needed to understand such a creature.

Nightbitch's Encounter with the Flickering

Nightbitch was thinking of another Flickering, a mother in Barisal, Bangladesh, who was reported to appear sometimes as a playful mongoose and other times as a mother. Though the woman had rodent-like tendencies rather than mongrel, Nightbitch found the ways in which she appeared and left, and her relationship to her children, quite interesting indeed. This creature was said to show up just as her children began a game outside, a beautiful mongoose with silky, gold-flecked fur who stole their balls and ruined their games and made them laugh. The children claimed it was their mother, because the mongoose answered to Ma (pronounced May) or Chokkabanijjo, their mother's given name. The fur, they said, felt just like their very own mother's hair, exactly the same color, and smelled just like her, with notes of sage and soap. Their mother, in mother form, had the same teeth as the mongoose, unnaturally sharp and biting. And never did the children ever see Ma the mongoose and Ma the mother in the same place at the same time.

The Flickering and Nightbitch's Transformation

The Flickering resonate with Nightbitch's own experience of transformation. When she had referred to herself as Nightbitch, she meant it as a good-natured self-deprecating joke, but in the days following this new naming, she found a patch of coarse black hair sprouting from the base of her neck. Her sense that society, adulthood, marriage, motherhood, all these things, were somehow masterfully designed to put a woman in her place and keep her there had begun to weigh on her, taking on a new shape and an unwieldy heft after her son arrived, and even more after she quit her job, as her body struggled to regain its equilibrium. Once she was stripped of all she had been, of her career, her comely figure, her ambition, her familiar hormones, an anti-feminist conspiracy seemed not only plausible but nearly inevitable. She inflated with mother-rage and composed elaborate, emotional arguments against the system and capitalism and the patriarchy and then religion and gender roles and biology.

The Flickering as a Place of Arrival

The Flickering ultimately connect to the novel's central revelation that Wanda White is not a person but a place at which a person finally arrives. Nightbitch, this mother, stands behind the heavy velvet curtain, in darkness, smelling her own rosy musk, in anticipatory ecstasy, just before she ascends to whatever is beyond that darkness and that stage. The Flickering, with their ability to appear and disappear, to be translucent or coyote-like, embody the very transformation that Nightbitch undergoes, and her arrival at Wanda White represents the culmination of her own flickering existence. Her most devout fans wear pins that ask where do you go at night? with the image of a ferocious dog, mouth open, about to attack, and the pins and other merchandise are the work of Jen, who has proved herself to be a PR genius. Sales of the once-out-of-print A Field Guide to Magical Women skyrocket, though no one, absolutely no one, can track down Wanda White, who proves to be a persona which exists only as an online profile at a defunct school.