Jāliek

If I’m alone, I’m probably talking to something. Most of the time, it doesn't talk back.

Usually it’s my phone. Sometimes it’s my Commu, which transcribes the ideas I say aloud while I’m driving to work, cleaning the house, or cooking dinner. Later I pull the notes up on my reMarkable and try to make sense of them. I love these little gadgets. They let me catch a thought before the next one runs over it.

Tonight I was talking about Ouija boards.

My mother taught me to be afraid of them, and I listened. I’ve never used one. My character Lore Lassen, however, has been reading about the board’s peculiar literary history and may be less sensible than I am. I was deciding whether she should buy one, write about it in her Oddments, perhaps work it into the riddles on her website, her journal, and in her manuscript that is, well, in reality my manuscript, my journal, and my website. Convoluted. I know.

Somewhere in that conversation, I said that voice-to-text is a strange cousin of automatic writing. I speak; words appear. Add AI to the conversation and it gets easier to imagine asking a machine a question and wondering whether it has brought back something other than data.

Then while effectively talking to myself about whether or not I should add the Ouija Board rabbit hole to Lore's lore I told my phone, “Yes, I like it.”

It typed: jāliek.

I laughed. Is that your name? Oh, spirit of the voice to text who struggles with my country accent?

I looked it up, expecting nonsense. Jāliek is Latvian: roughly, must put or has to be placed. I was asking whether I should put the Ouija entry on Lore’s website, and my phone appeared to answer that I had to put it there.

I know how dictation errors work. I also know I’m the person who will find a pattern in three pearls and follow it all the way down a rabbit hole. Still, the timing made me look at the word on my screen for a long time.

Lore’s entry is going in Oddments.

I have not bought a Ouija board. I don't intend to.

NOTES FROM BESIDE

Lore’s Oddment, “Good Luck,” is the rabbit hole I was deciding whether to put on her site. It begins with a writer’s pen name inside a locket and ends with Lore declining to write down the name her board gave her.

My phone was less discreet.