Good Mornings

Good Mornings: A Collection

by Alan Carl Nicoll

Rod Judkins said, “…instead of getting them to come up with one idea, I get them to come up with a hundred.” (The Art of Creative Thinking: 89 Ways to See Things Differently, Penguin Random House LLC, New York, 2016.)

Novels, and chapters of novels, often start with a sunrise. Seeking to test my creativity, and practicing to be a novelist, I started one day to write as many different ways of putting a sunrise in a story as I could think of. Here, presented without apology, follows the result of that effort. Nowadays, whenever I get to thinking that I’m lacking in creativity, I look at this document and am comforted. (I want to spell that word “Nowdays,” but a Google search persuades me to use the “correct” spelling.) I had visions sometimes of sending this to the New Yorker, but have decided not to bother. The list starts slow.

Sunrising.
Dawning.
Mornining.
It was morning.
Morning light.
Dawn’s red glare.
The turning of the Earth exposed this part of its surface to light from the sun.
Rosy-fingered Dawn parted the curtains of the day.
Morning came to Stebbins Court.
The sun peeked over the edge of the world.
Sturdy yellow pines on the peaks to the east were silhouetted against the lightening sky, while nuthatches tootled and Cassin’s finches sang.
It was a glorious morning.
Dawn came, clear and cool.
A dewdrop on a blade of grass reflected the sunrise.
Morning sunlight glinted from the dewy grass.
Windows of houses on mountainsides to the west shone brightly in the morning sun.
Windows of houses on mountainsides to the west blazed in the morning.
The dawn slid through the spectrum, settling finally on blue.
Morning light came like ghosts through the windows of the Walsh house.
It was a fine morning.
Seff’s Tuesday began with a clear, cold morning.
The night’s chill lingered into the morning.
Morning sun came like a loose hubcap spinning down the street.
Dawn grew like a time-lapsed flower.
Sunrise went “sproing.”
The sun came up with a clatter of castanets.
Sunrise shattered the night.
The sun shattered the mirror of the eastern sky.
The sun surfaced in the ocean of the eastern sky.
The sun came up like a mushroom cloud.
The sun shone like the face of a spelling-contest winner.
The rising sun.
The rising sun gleamed like the butt of an obese Belgian glimpsed past the shade of a bedroom window.
Sunrise shattered the night like a clatter of castanets.
The sun appeared like the eye of an owl in a flash of headlights.
The sun wallowed above the horizon like the yolk of a rotten egg.
He watched the sun come up.
Through her tears, she watched the sun come up.
That morning…
While he was digging a hole to bury his wife’s head, the sun came up, unnoticed.
In the flesh of the eastern sky the sun was a ringworm.
The sun was a dreary, baleful eye contemplating the follies of Homo lemmingus.
The sun dripped sunshine and pity.
The sun shone.
The sun gleamed like a jaundiced eye.
The sun wept light.
The sun shouted on the horizon.
The rising sun touched a paintbrush to the western mountains.
The sun said, “Good morning!”
The sun hit him in the eye like a baseball.
The sun hit him in the eye like a cotton ball.
The sun sprouted like a daisy.
The sun oozed up out of the horizon.
The sun oozed up out of the horizon like a drop of blood.
Looking at the sun, he realized that he had missed another sunrise.
One more sunrise had slipped past him, unobserved.
The baby gurgled to the morning sun.
In the history of the Earth’s sunrises, this was the most glorious.
When he saw the sunrise, the artist wept.
“Wow, look at the sun!” the boy said.
She said, “It’s dawn. You must go.”
The poet sat, pen in hand, waiting for the dawn.
The rising sun triggered the shutdown of the security lights on the estate of Oliver Devane.
The sunflowers beside the abandoned mill turned toward the rising sun.
“If you stand right here, you can see the sunrise in the windshield of my old Studebaker.”
Sunrise at Stonehenge marked the summer solstice.
The Sphinx at Giza saw its 1,826,250^th sunrise, give or take a few.
The silver dreamcatcher above Molly’s bed glinted in the first rays of the sunrise of her sixteenth birthday.
The baby’s eyes opened to her first sunrise.
The old man’s eyes closed on his last sunrise.
It was another day.
He was shot at dawn.
The sun rose like a trapdoor spider emerging from his hole.
The sun did not look like a drop of blood that morning.
The sun rose like a malevolent orange.
The sun slobbered on the horizon.
The sun shuddered and wheezed through another sunrise.
The sun gawked above the edge of the earth.
Molly jiggled her tits at the rising sun.
The sun strutted up the sky.
A tousled morning sun pummeled the wildflowers.
The rising sun was in a droll mood.
The weasel, caught in a trap by his left forefoot, went berserk with fear at sunrise.
The sun warmed Miriam with a stickykiss.
The sun soared up to the horizon and perched, watchful.
The sun rose thoughtfully.
Ever thoughtful, the sun rose on time.
The liberal sun shone on a world of dictators.
The metal bimbo cutouts on the truck’s mudflaps ahead flashed the morning sun in Steve’s eyes.
The sun rose like a yellow beret on the head of an aged beatnik climbing the stairs.
The sunrise made her long for cheesecake; everything made her long for cheesecake.
A rabble of ragamuffins ran toward the sunrise.
The sun’s buck teeth took a bite of horizon.
The sun cartwheeled into view.
“The sun is actually a hole into another dimension,” the lecturer said.
The sun and the horizon played brinkmanship.
The sun breached.
The sun looked like an enormous wen on the neck of the world.
“Here comes the sun!” Cathy said.
The sun looked rather chinless that morning.
Elmer Fudd’s head never shone so brightly as the sun did that morning.
“I think it’s time we had a new sun. I get tired of the same old sun every day. Better yet, let’s have two—blue and yellow, perhaps, like Albireo.”
The sun rose only once that day.
“Daddy, will the sun rise tomorrow?”
“Look, Timmy,” Cathy said to her teddy bear, “It’s morning.”
A brass lantern was lifted in the east.
A light shone from the east.
The sun rose, but the dawning of humanity had not yet come.
The sun rose, and the sunlight pierced the clouds of broken concrete.
“He is risen.”
The sun rose on a plain of despair.
Optimistically, the sun rose.
The sun rose that evening.
“The moon rose, and when I say the moon, I mean the sun.”
The sun rose, looking just like a cabbage, if a cabbage looked like the sun.
The sun barged into the night.
The sun sat in reverse.
The sun ate into the sky like acid into tin.
Ra began the day.
Dawn came, ending the revelry of the coven.
Dawn came onto the battlefield.
The sunrise looked like a drop of blood in a puddle of nonfat milk.
The sun rose, punching through sullen clouds.
The sun shouldered through the clouds.
The sun popped out like Janet Jackson’s breast.
The sunrise was more beautiful than a six-year-old’s…pastel.
She kissed the morning sun.
When the sunlight pierced the bedroom curtains, the woman turned over and tried to go back to sleep.
The old man saluted the sunrise with a finger and a curse.
Dawn that day was Daliesque.
The sunrise was as abstract as abstract can be.
“Won’t that sun ever come up?”
God hawked, and spat the sun.
God mooned the Earth, and it was the sun.
At sunrise, he said, “I gin to be aweary of the sun.”
The increasing light woke him.
To the sleepy children he said, “Today is another day.”
The ancient sun rose on the ancient earth.
When the sun rose he said, “Hey, who did that?”
At sunrise he said, “As we stand here, we are approaching the sun at over eight hundred miles an hour, better than Mach 1.”
“Aagh! Radiation!”
“Turn it off! Turn it off!”
“Look what I have created!”
Morning picked a great scab off the sun.
The sun rose like an unwanted erection.
Once again, the sun kissed the Earth.
As the sun rose, he said, “The sun we are seeing is actually the sun of eight minutes ago. Am I correct?”
If the sun rose and nobody was there to see it, did the sun actually rise?
“Whaddaya want from me? It’s morning.”
“Aw, Honey, it’s too early. Go back to sleep.”