Cherry Blossom Girls Box Set

by Harmon Cooper

One time, I’d received a message from a reader telling me my fight scenes weren’t believable, and that adrenaline didn’t really make you feel thirsty, or make you feel somehow incapacitated, or make your heart beat so quickly that it felt like it had somehow lodged itself in your throat.

  But I just experienced all that, and I knew that what I had written – while maybe a little bit exaggerated – was more or less close to the truth.

  I was living proof that the aftershock of adrenaline sucked.

  “Why are you arguing with this bad reviewer in your head?” I asked as I returned to the passed-out woman.

  The concrete floor was still cold, but I was much more focused on her, and what to do with her, and how she was sleeping yet still preventing me from using my cell phone.

  “Superheroes aren’t real, magic powers aren’t real, shifters aren’t real,” I told myself.

  I tried writing superhero fiction before, but it wasn’t that great. I had been too poisoned by Marvel and DC Comics to ever create something on my own, so I scrapped that manuscript. Yet here I was with a possible superhero … or villain?

  I glanced at the woman, my heart in my throat again.

  Was it really in your throat? a voice inside my head asked, but I ignored that voice because it was really in my throat. I mean, I couldn’t feel it, but I could definitely taste blood – wait, no.

  No, I couldn’t taste blood, but I was definitely shocked, and I definitely didn’t know how to react.

  “Just breathe, Gideon, just breathe,” I told myself. Speaking in third person was a sure sign of insanity. “You can do this, Gideon.”

  “Please, be quiet,” the woman finally said to me. “Your brain is so wild, so … untamed.”

  “Welcome to being a writer,” I said. “Okay, I’m not a great writer or anything, I just wanted to say something clever to you … um, yeah, I’ll just be quiet for a moment.”

  She sat up suddenly, tears streaming down her face.

  I dropped to the floor as my thoughts tore out of my head.

  It took every ounce of courage not to shriek in agony as my brain pulsed, my eyes bulged, my temples grew to the size of turnips. Something moved through me, razed my inner organs, toasted my medulla oblongata.

  “Please, stop,” I whispered, pain tearing at my insides. “Please …”

  “Sleep,” she said, and with those words, I felt my eyes grow tired.

  I stood and stumbled forward, propelled by an unknown force.

  Quiet, Writer Gideon.

  I sat down on the bed next to her and yawned. I could feel her presence next to me even with my drowsiness. My head slouched forward. And I slowly began to lie back onto the bed.

  I felt her join me moments later, her wet hair against my chest and neck.

  Chapter Three: No Naked Moms in the Morning

  “Mom?”

  Morning came and with it an absolutely terrifying visual. My fifty-seven-year-old mother stood before me completely naked – breasts hanging off to the side, stretch marks on her belly, an untamed bush, and a gnarly scar from her recent knee surgery.

  “What in the fuck?” I shouted, pulling away from her.

  It wasn’t that I’d forgotten what happened last night, nor the mysterious woman who had shown up at my doorstep; it was more the fact that I’d just woken up and saw my mom standing naked in front of me.

  It was an unsettling experience, to say the least.

  I was so confused upon waking up to such a sight that I didn’t put two and two together and realize it was the shifter, or psychic – or as I quickly recalled, both.

  “Please … anything but that,” I told the mysterious woman, my eyes clenched shut. “Any image but that.”

  “Does this image disturb you?” she asked in a soft voice.

  I nodded. “Just be yourself.”

  Who knew what ‘herself’ really was, or what that loaded phrase actually entailed. For all I knew, her Scandinavian features were also just a form she’d taken … that she was actually someone else entirely. Hell, she could even be a man.

  That got me thinking about shapeshifters in general and where their exterior features go when they change form.

  I never thought about those things when I watched Mystique on the big screen or read comic books about shapeshifters. Hell, even while playing some type of shifter in an RPG, the thought never came to me.

  I guess that was the writer in me – the clueless writer, really … because if I had been a better writer or a better observer, I would have probably thought of these things before.

  At any rate, I had no idea where exterior body parts like muscle mass and boobage went when a shifter changed forms, and that was probably because shifters weren’t supposed to be real in the first place.

  “I’m living in a fantasy world,” I said, my eyes still shut.

  “I changed back.”

  I slowly peeked my eyes open to see that the woman had changed back to her original form: pale skin, long blonde hair, deep blue eyes.

  Of course I took a peek at her other parts – what man wouldn’t? – but I tried to keep my gaze at shoulder level and professional.

  If you’d asked me the day before, my plan for this morning was to just wake up and write a thousand words or so in my newest book, which I was calling Breakpoint Online.

  Looking back, the premise wasn’t very clever. Basically, a guy trapped in a VR world was forced to team up with his arch nemesis, a mysterious female, in order to free himself – but the story was fresh on my mind, and I had an urge to finish it, just get it done.

  What would you like to do to me?

  “What would I like to do to you?” I couldn’t help but smile at her. “That’s a weird question to ask someone when you first meet them. Also, you’re speaking in my head again. I’d prefer if you just spoke to me out loud. Is that okay with you? As long as you can speak with your real voice, please just do that. I have enough things zipping around in my mind and stressing me the hell out … like the fact that you’ve shown up.”

  “I can go,” she said turning to the door.

  If you’re thinking that I should have let her go to prevent all that was about to happen from happening, you would be correct. If I’d let her go just then, my life wouldn’t have changed, I wouldn’t have ‘broken bad,’ and I would have gone on to live a normal-ish New Englander life.

  But put yourself in my shoes for just a moment.

  I was a twenty-five-year-old guy who worked in what was basically a Yale gift shop (although we sold other things including tchotchkes and for some reason, lamps – lots of fucking lamps), who lived alone, hadn’t had a girlfriend in two years, had a hipster beard, and who wrote science fiction for gamers as a hobby.

  Now I’m not going to sit here and tell you that I was a loser, because I’ve met way bigger losers than myself, but I definitely wasn’t a winner – which didn’t necessarily make me a loser, but it put me pretty close to being one.

  “Wait,” I called after her. “You can stay but … maybe put some clothes on for a second so I can figure all this out.”

  Also an amateur move, but having a beautiful nude woman standing before me was distracting, and I needed to get to the bottom of what was going on here.

  She agreed and turned to my closet, where she found a button up shirt that was a few sizes too large for her and put it on. She tried on a few of my pants only to realize that they wouldn’t fit her very well, which I could have told her if she was paying attention to me.

  The thing was, she wasn’t paying attention to me in the least bit.

  Even as I spoke to her, she just focused on her task of getting dressed, ignoring me entirely.

  Eventually, she settled on a pair of sweatpants I’d been meaning to get rid of.

  “You should put on some of my underwear too,” I told her. I don’t know why I told her this, I just figured that everyone should be wearing underwear.

  She didn’t feel the same way. With my button up shirt
over her chest and my sweatpants on, she turned to me and did a little twirl.

  “Nice clothes.”

  I shrugged. “Sorry I don’t have any, um, women’s clothing, but my uncle’s the one into that stuff.”

  I was trying to be funny, but my humor – however terrible it may be – had little or no effect on her.

  She approached me, the movement of her shoulders reminding me of the way a tiger stalks its prey.

  I was suddenly nervous seeing her so close to me, and no, I wasn’t the type of guy who had never been with a woman before or anything like that, it was just … well, it was all of it.

  All of it.

  From her sudden appearance in my life to the way she looked at me. I was on pins and needles (another cliché, but fuck it, it worked).

  “Let’s start with the basics,” I told her. “How did you end up on the street last night?”

  I couldn’t get a sense of the weather outside, but I knew the sun was out, and I knew that the thunderstorm had gone somewhere else, possibly over to Long Island. Good riddance.

  “I …” she bit her lip. “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know?”

  Something about the way she looked at me betrayed what she’d just said. I sensed it at the time but figured I shouldn’t press it.

  “Okay then, so what about your abilities? I mean you can change your appearance, and I guess you can change your clothes too, right?”

  This made me question if I should have given her any of my clothes or if it would have even mattered.

  “Yes.” A white kimono with blue flowers cascaded down her body.

  I had no idea where she’d seen something like that until I remembered that I had an old painting of a Japanese woman hanging near my bed.

  I glanced over my shoulder at the painting to see the geisha in her white kimono with blue flowers to confirm this.

  I swallowed hard. “That is something,” I said as the white makeup on the woman’s face intensified and her deep red lips bloomed with color. “So, you can change into anyone or anything. What about your voice, does your voice change?”

  “I don’t know.” It was the same voice as before. She stood there in her geisha form, her hand on her throat.

  “Okay, change back into me, and speak to me.” I looked at her curiously for a moment. “You know what I mean.”

  The woman morphed into my spitting image, even down to my cowlick. She wore the same gray house sweater I currently wore, and the same beard hung from her chin.

  “Hi,” she said, “my name is Gideon, and I live in a dirty place.”

  I laughed. While she spoke to me from my body, it was still her soft voice.

  It’s not that bad, I thought as I cursed myself for leaving a pile of clothes near my writing desk.

  “This is a very dirty place.” She turned, and for the first time, I saw something on her neck that troubled me.

  It was some type of port covered by a small flap of flesh. If she hadn’t been in my form, I wouldn’t have seen it. The port was just behind her right ear, and as she turned back to me, she noticed that I’d seen it.

  “What is that?” I asked.

  “I …” Tears began to well in her eyes – in my eyes, because she was still in my form. “I don’t know.”

  “Can I touch it?” I asked.

  She approached me and sat down on the bed.

  Before touching her neck, I touched her sweater. It was hard not to gasp when I found that the texture was spot on.

  “That’s amazing,” I whispered. “It’s like you can grow clothes.”

  “Grow clothes,” she said. “I can grow clothes.” A dress started to appear on her body, yet she still hadn’t changed from my body, which only makes it harder to describe. I’d never worn a dress before, even for Halloween.

  “Change back to your original form,” I told her.

  My face melted away, replaced by her long blonde hair and strikingly beautiful eyes. Her clothes morphed back into the ones she’d taken from my closet earlier, and she moved her hair to the side, craning her neck toward me.

  “Is that …” I used my fingernail to push open the small covering on the port.

  I’d never seen this type of technology; it was like they’d fused flesh and plastic to make the covering.

  “Do you mind?” I asked as I hovered my hand over her heart. She shook her head and I placed my hand on her chest, feeling her heartbeat. I then checked her pulse. “You’re definitely human,” I concluded as I returned to the port on her neck and its covering.

  “Yes, I’m human.”

  “It’s like the consistency of a callus or something.” I popped the cover open.

  “What is it?” she asked, her eyes focused forward.

  I laughed. “It’s a mini USB port. That’s … incredibly odd.”

  It was 2030, and some things still charged using these ports, although most electronics charged wirelessly.

  “I can plug you in,” I whispered. And my immediate thought – and seriously, blame the gamer and gamelit writer in me for this one – was that I could customize her and adjust her stats.

  I quickly replaced this thought with a better, more logical one: Maybe I can find out more about her if I plugged her in.

  “What are you thinking, Writer Gideon?”

  “Writer Gideon, huh? Okay, that name works. I’m thinking we need to plug you in to my laptop. At the very least, maybe we can adjust your shifter voice settings, to make it more believable. Just a hunch.”

  “And then what?”

  “I don’t know just yet,” I admitted.

  “And we can get out of this dirty place?”

  “My place isn’t that bad, but sure. You’re right. We can get out of here. At least I think so. Let me order the cable I need from EBAYmazon. It’ll be here in an hour or so; then we can get started.”

  She looked at the arc of light coming from the windows. “Can we go outside?”

  “You mean while we’re waiting for the shipment to arrive?” I considered this for a moment. “Sure, but change your form to a different woman, and, um, just don’t do anything crazy. No shifting in public.”

  She changed first to my mother, and I laughed.

  “No, not her. Please, stop doing that.”

  Her form morphed to the geisha on my wall.

  “Better, but you’ll draw attention with all the makeup and the hairstyle.”

  The geisha’s bun disappeared, and the makeup melted away.

  “Yeah, that’ll work, but seriously – no changing forms in public. At least not yet.”

  Chapter Four: Shifting in Public

  It was a little cold outside, but not too bad. Even if it had been cold, it would have been hard to focus on the weather. As soon as I opened the door to my apartment I was greeted by a sea of cherry blossom trees, truly a sight to behold.

  They had bloomed overnight, and the sidewalk was covered in some of the blossoms that had already fallen from the trees. Farther into Wooster Square, people took pictures of the blossoms, posing in front of them. My end of the street was relatively quiet, though. Which would turn out to be a blessing in disguise.

  “I really need a name for you,” I told the mysterious woman as I continued to take in the scene.

  She stood next to me in my clothing but still with her geisha looks. Meaning she looked Japanese or some type of Asian. I wasn’t good at identifying Asians, but I had a friend in high school who’s from Taiwan who could tell me where any Asian she saw originated from based on their fashion sense and facial features.

  But that was beside the point.

  I needed something to call her besides ‘mysterious woman,’ or ‘naked shifter who showed up at my door.’

  My phone buzzed, and I quickly took it out of my pocket. It was a message from another author I knew, a Canadian fantasy sci-fi author named Luke Lyrian. He mainly wrote paranormal space operas, but he also dabbled in gamelit.

  Luke: Hey.


  I’d never met Luke in person, but we’d been talking on GoogleFace for like two years now. Funny, that.

  “Beautiful looking,” the woman whispered as cherry blossoms began to stitch across her sweater.

  “Remember, no shifting in public,” I reminded her. “And regarding the cherry blossoms, you showed up at the right time. They don’t bloom for very long, and if you had shown up a month later, they’d be gone. But like I was saying, what do you want me to call you?”

  My phone buzzed again, and I glanced down at it.

  Luke: So, I got this cover concept back from my artist. It’s just a concept, but I’m loving it. What do you think?

  Me: That’s fucking sick.

  Luke: You like it?

  Me: It’s ill. Looks good as a thumbnail too. I’d add a bit more texture, maybe something to the title to make it pop. Not that yellow doesn’t already pop, but to ground it a little. So, I guess not pop, but give it some character. I like the subtle color change on the author name. I wish I could think of a cool ‘Star’ title, but I don’t want to steal your thunder.

  Luke: Plenty of Star titles to go around. It’s all about writing to market.

  Me: Star Toucher. Star Battler. Star Justice. Star Delvers. Star Online. Star Hammer Online. Paranormal Star Hammerz Online. Star Bastards – that last one was a crazy book, btw. Who would have thought that a dwarf, a goblin, and a gnome would make a killer space trio?

  Luke: For sure. That book sold thousands and thousands of copies.

  Me: And it spawned so many knockoffs. Star Bitties, Star Kidz, Star Dirt Boys, Star Bistro. Did you read Star Bistro?

  Luke: I did not.

  Me: It was about a bistro in some galaxy far far away that was taken over by a group of Muslim terrorists. That book got some flack, but the fight scenes were choice.

  Luke: I made it through the first two chapters. Yeah, no. Not for me.

  “Name …” the woman said as she touched her face. “I need a name.”

  “No changing forms,” I reminded her. “Just let me message my friend real quick and then we’ll go check out the cherry blossoms.”

  I replied to Luke’s last comment.