Moving into the third month of writing flash fiction for Jennie Coughlin’s Story Cube Challenge, I’m seeing the potential in this exercise. Not only am I exploring aspects of characters I thought I knew pretty well, I’m accumulating material for what I think will be a good collection of espionage flash fiction. I’m calling it Spy Flash. Well, I thought it was clever.

As with last week, where I looked a little more into a secondary character, I decided to bring in another character who goes from being primary to secondary and back again a great deal in Mai and Alexei’s professional and personal lives.

Edwin “Snake” Terrell, Jr., is a former Green Beret who is now a CIA field operative. The CIA and the fictional Directorate have a long history of working together, and Terrell, Alexei, and Nelson have shared missions–and other things and people–quite often. He is an interesting character, at least I think so. An inveterate boozer and womanizer, he is a philosopher at heart and has the degrees to prove it. And, as you’ll see, he and Mai have, shall we say, history.

Here’s what I saw this week: (l. to r.) bee; building; dragon; hanging on for dear life; carrying; falling down the stairs; clock/time/0400; magnifying glass/scrutiny; parachute/parachuting/ parachutist

Because it’s not as quotidian as the other items/actions this week, I picked the dragon to center the story around.

You may wonder why in “Here, There Be Dragons” Terrell and Mai are parachuting in the dark into Romania–that’s another story for another time.

If you don’t see the link in the title, hover your cursor over the Story Cubes Challenge tab above and select “Here, There Be Dragons” from the drop-down list. If you want to give this a try yourself, use the picture above, write a story based on the items/actions you see, then post a link to your story in a comment to Jenny Coughlin’s blog post.