Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    The Fall of Icarus (The Elevator, The Fall of Icarus, and The Girl)
    The Fall of Icarus (The Elevator, The Fall of Icarus, and The Girl)
    The Fall of Icarus (The Elevator, The Fall of Icarus, and The Girl)
    Ebook40 pages35 minutes

    The Fall of Icarus (The Elevator, The Fall of Icarus, and The Girl)

    By NR Bates

    5/5

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    THE FALL OF ICARUS (THE ELEVATOR, THE FALL OF ICARUS, AND THE GIRL).  Three interconnected short-stories set in Paris explore the issue of choice, survival and transformation. In the first story, a young man on his first business trip is waylaid by an aberrant elevator. In the pivotal tale, a young scientist re-imagines the Greek myth of Icarus and his fall to earth. In the final story, a young woman who cannot recall her own name relates the fantastical tale of a girl who can fly.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherNR Bates
    Release dateMar 30, 2015
    ISBN9780993190575
    The Fall of Icarus (The Elevator, The Fall of Icarus, and The Girl)
    Author

    NR Bates

    I am fortunate to share my life with my wife, and seven cats and one dog. British by birth, and Canadian by naturalization, I alternate between the UK, Canada and islands in the mid-Atlantic. I am an oceanographer by training, and my scientific research has focused on understanding the biological, chemical and physical processes that control carbon dioxide in the ocean and ocean acidification. I have published over one hundred and twenty scientific papers and contributed to policy documents including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assessments. 

    Related to The Fall of Icarus (The Elevator, The Fall of Icarus, and The Girl)

    Related ebooks

    Magical Realism For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Aughts

      Sep 11, 2017

      Aughts
      23 min read

    • Article

      Maybe It Won’t Be That Bad

      Dec 9, 2019

      Maybe It Won’t Be That Bad
      4 min read

    • Article

      The World Beneath Our Feet

      Sep 1, 2020

      The World Beneath Our Feet
      8 min read

    • Article

      Three Poems

      Sep 1, 2022

      1. Here there’s no rainy season.Sun scalds my forehead,yet the pool is empty. Beside it,a toppled table, its glass surface shattered.The asphalt is too hot for bare feet. 2. Far away: white hillocksand white dunes under a deepblue sky. Swirling winds

      5 min read

    • Article

      Woman About Town

      May 26, 2022

      FOR THE PAST YEAR, I’ve been writing a book about women and fame in the noughties. It’s a compellingly strange decade to look back on. At the time, I was highly prone to paroting the utopianism of tech libertarians — the internet would make everythin

      4 min read

    • Article

      Roger’s PROFANISAURUS

      Feb 2, 2023

      Roger’s PROFANISAURUS
      8 min read

    • Article

      Roger’s PROFANISAURUS

      Feb 2, 2023

      Roger’s PROFANISAURUS
      8 min read

    • Article

      Roger’s PROFANISAURUS

      May 18, 2023

      Roger’s PROFANISAURUS
      7 min read

    • Article

      FOUR POEMS for Lucie Brock-Broido

      Jul 1, 2019

      Correspondence from Madam Rachel, Purveyor of Eternal Youth, to Mister Walter Potter, Anthropomorphic Dioramist, ca. 1880 Most Splendid Immortalist: Herewith you have a letter sent by my solicitor, writtenin my final leapt year, my sliver of pound ca

      3 min read

    • Article

      Roger’s PROFANISAURUS

      Jan 5, 2022

      Roger’s PROFANISAURUS
      5 min read

    • Article

      Forgive Us Our Trespasses

      Jun 3, 2021

      Forgive Us Our Trespasses
      4 min read

    • Article

      Apparition

      Mar 26, 2020

      Apparition
      8 min read

    • Article

      Stranger Places

      Aug 9, 2018

      It began like any normal pregame in the woods. Naked, alone, hungover, a sweaty sleeping bag in the back of a dusty pickup truck, miles from civilization. Predawn in a narrow Utah river bottom, canyon country, early July. A Thermos of lukewarm coffee

      18 min read

    • Article

      Roger’S PROFANISAURUS

      Aug 4, 2022

      profanisaurus@viz.co.uk air fryer 1. n. Device for making chips that won’t fur up your arteries. 2. n. A highcalorie food’s ghost exorcised from the premises of one who enjoys an unusually high-fat diet. Alan Sugar’s beard n. A straggly, threadbare f

      6 min read

    • Article

      The Eternal Adventure

      Jun 29, 2021

      The Eternal Adventure
      4 min read

    • Article

      The Trouble Gene

      Jul 1, 2020

      One clear thing about trouble—it can set you back to zero, a personal cone of silence. And reading, writing, listening allow entry into that troubled solitude; you disappear into it regardless t of the time or place you really are in, be it bed, kitc

      12 min read

    • Article

      Nick Laird

      Dec 15, 2017

      I was trying to write like an adult.I had children.I was at the end of something. As I waited at my table by the window for the coffee,I saw that the sirocco had depositeda scrim of dust on the sill overnight,and it was the dark red of powdered blood

      3 min read

    • Article

      I, Spy

      Aug 7, 2018

      Many things happened to me for the first time on a night in April 1944. I rode in a Black Maria; I jumped from a bomber with a tangled parachute; and I began my mission in wartime France as a British secret agent. We drove in the Black Maria from Int

      17 min read

    • Article

      At The Bend Of The Road

      Jul 20, 2021

      At The Bend Of The Road
      18 min read

    • Article

      The Beyoğlu Municipality Waste Management Orchestra

      Jun 8, 2021

      Selim the half-wit hoarded everything—that was the story they told me my first day in waste management. Selim had lost his wife, and I guess everyone figured he took up hoarding as a way to fill the void. It started out with stuff his wife might have

      24 min read

    • Article

      A Year in Reading: Jason R Jimenez

      Dec 10, 2019

      Can you imagine a world without frogs? Or even less of them? What is the night without a symphony of croaks? I want to ask that to everyone. The post A Year in Reading: Jason R Jimenez appeared first on The Millions.

      6 min read

    • Article

      It’s Come to This

      Sep 1, 2021

      It’s Come to This
      16 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for The Fall of Icarus (The Elevator, The Fall of Icarus, and The Girl)

    5/5

    1 rating1 review

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 5/5
      The Fall of Icarus offers three interlinked short stories sharing the locale, flavor, and focus of Paris and tell of falls, flights, and endurance in the lives of three very different individuals. All this is done in a production well below a hundred pages: an amazing achievement, given that so much is imparted using so little space.

      In 'The Elevator', Ianos becomes trapped in a shabby, tiny old French elevator and when the doors finally open, something magical changes his life and introduces him to a Paris of loss and possibility. How many times will he embark on that journey? A surreal saga captures reader interest.

      'The Fall of Icarus' is also about flights: this one injecting the allegory of a mythical son who ignored direction and traveled too close to the sun into the life of one who chose to "…follow a middle way—not too bright, not too foolish, and not too confident. I succumbed, and I did not excel in any way. Perhaps without realizing it, I followed this path as a means of real escape and not the imagining of escape by taking flight."

      It, too, is replete with the possibilities introduced by the unexpected experience which defies preset notions and logic.

      'The Girl' features a protagonist even more lost (she can't remember her own name, but she is immersed in recording the stories and words of others - to the point of lacking of her own life). Can an unexpected tale introduce her to new choices and experiences?

      All three stories excel in a sense of wonder and feature delightful twists and contemplative scenarios all immersed in Parisian atmosphere and powerfully surreal moments. Readers with a special affinity for the short story format who want to see atmosphere and psychology works flavored with a tinge of the eerie will delight in these well-done literary pieces.

    Book preview

    The Fall of Icarus (The Elevator, The Fall of Icarus, and The Girl) - NR Bates

    Acknowledgements

    I would like to thank the following. Margaret H.P. Best—without her support this collection of short stories would not exist, and for her patience and her reading and listening to drafts of this novel. S.J. Parkinson—I am truly grateful for his continued encouragement during the light and dark days of writing and publishing. Lynn McNamee at Red Adept Publishing (RAP), North Carolina, for her advice. Sarah Carleton at RAP for her patience, dedication, and patience with multiple edits of these short stories. Jason Anderson at Polgarus Studio, for his formatting of this book. In the cover design, the photograph of altocumulus is credited to Norikazu; while the human with wings logo is credited to Sergey Korkin—both on license from Shutterstock. All of you have my deep and grateful thanks. This collection of short stories was inspired in part by the painting, The Fall of Icarus, by Pablo Picasso.

    1

    THE ELEVATOR

    The moving elevator carried me in its deliberate, ordinary manner until it jolted to a stop and, at the flicker of overhead light, lurched sideways in a purposeful but tremulous motion. I couldn’t help but let out a stifled gasp, fearing the worst, as I instinctively reached out to the elevator wall to steady myself, and the cane I temporarily used clattered on the metal floor. The thud of its impact added to my surprise, and my other hand reached into the fabric of my back pocket where my cell phone nestled—in safety still.

    What is wrong with the lift? I hastily thought, slipping into British English. I often switched between words from both sides of the Atlantic Ocean without it being a willful, deliberate choice. Mobile phone would slip out in the US and cellphone in the UK, or gas and petrol would be reversed. The habit suited my name, Ianos. I was baptized after a mythical namesake, Janus, the god of doorways—the god of two faces, of the present and past, and of endings. The latter term—of endings—seemed the most appropriate at that moment.

    I shared the elevator with a neat stack of bottles still tightly sealed in a covering of plastic, waiting to be released to join others somewhere within the building. The fragrance of warm bread, lying in a basket atop the bottles, filled the elevator. It was the sixth time I had taken the elevator, and its character had settled into the familiarity of memory. The first time I used the elevator, briefcase in one hand, cane in the other, and straps of my carry-on lightly weighted over my shoulders, I couldn’t help but notice the size of its interior. It was a tiny elevator. It occurred to me that if it came to an unexpected stop, and the lights turned out, I could have reached out to touch its walls with the tips of my elbows, and the claw of claustrophobia would have risen up into my throat.

    Enjoying the preview?
    Page 1 of 1