Stowaway snake sneaks onboard United Airline flight from Florida to Charlotte (N.C.) to enjoy a vacation with four humans. At first it’s exciting to know she’s on board. But then she discovers what it’s like to be on an airplane with no one of her own. She starts to feel she’s being left behind, until they finally find a seat that doesn’t have a human in it. “The whole idea of having a human in flight is so surreal and so exciting.”
The story of the Stowaway is told by its author, Chris Jones. He, along with his wife, Karen, and an artist friend, spent a whole year collecting all the stories they could find that fit the theme. The result is a full-length work, called “The Stowaway,” that takes the theme from an actual event that happened in 1971, in which four astronauts made the first space walk. The astronauts were scheduled to climb out of a space shuttle at a few moments after landing, but they had become separated.
The Stowaway tells the story of a young woman who is a year older than the astronauts. She finds herself on an airplane without four humans she used to know on board. She learns to appreciate being on a ride with no humans. “So many people would rather be on an airplane with nothing but other humans than be stranded all alone on an airplane with no humans in it.”
Jones said the first year of collecting stories was a tough one. “It was hard to know where to get the stories,” he said. “I wanted to find the right stories. I wanted to make sure they fit with the story I was trying to tell.”
To find stories of the astronauts having fun on their Space Shuttle days—with the help of an artist friend—Jones and his wife, Karen, used the Internet and then a few magazines. “It was like fishing,” Karen said. “We just sent out the stories to publications, and then we went through them and did what we could to figure out which stories were worth keeping.”
The first stories Jones thought of that fit the theme had