Jake Kowalla

Running Tape Jake Kowalla

Running Tape is a work of speculative fiction, spanning from the mid 1960's to the early 1980's, consisting of two episodes and their companion vignettes. The first piece, Running Tape, finds Denton Hardgrove unknowingly drawn into the life of his doppelganger, Jack, whose past grows more entangled with his own, as a bizarre phenomenon erases his phantom identity. The effects of his experience leave him deciphering esoteric bits of a life through what could be a parallel universe, time slips, or a complete psychotic break. The second episode, The Whisper & Hiss, follows Jack Dulrich, Denton's binary, through early supernatural experiences in childhood, up to the events leading to his disappearance. Jack struggles with a tenuous grasp on the natural world, while confronting echoes in time and consciousness, an eclipsing lost love, and the erosion of his memory and sanity. Running Tape is a meditation on an existential crisis of mind, an opus to love, loss, Americana, and a nostalgic farewell letter to ourselves from a place we inhabited not so long ago. Excerpt from The Whisper & Hiss - "He dreamt in a patchwork of pictures. He dreamt of being a boy in the backseat of a luxury car and of being given a tour of an immense strip mine.... a copper mine.... and it was the strangest thing. He found he could recall memories in this dream that had no point of reference in his waking life. As he realized this, the dreaming abruptly stopped and faded into a black and distant space. It watched him leave... and as if caught for fraud, he was made to fade away."