Four months already, and I’m still amazed that I’ve kept up with this. The key thing is that the Rory’s Story Cube Challenge forces me to write something new every week. Hmm, it’s almost as if writer friend Jennie Coughlin knew I needed a kick in the butt when she came up with the challenge. I consider my butt kicked, and thankfully so.

Several regular readers (Squeee! I have regular readers!) of the series have asked if I’m going to compile the Spy Flash stories into a book, and the answer is, indeed I am. I’m going to wait until I have twenty-six stories (half a year) and publish a volume entitled, big surprise, “Spy Flash,” as an e-book for Kindle. And maybe a paperback. We’ll see.

What I saw: l. to r. – break/broken; raising hand/speaking; keyhole; crying/weeping; a die; sadness; romance/hand-in-hand/holding hands; sheep; scales/balance/justice

This week’s roll of the cubes featured a set of scales, which for me means justice. I majored in Russian history, and one of my Spy Flash characters is Russian, so something came to mind almost immediately. I did a little research to confirm my recollection of what I’d studied decades ago, and the result is this week’s story, “Prizraki.” That’s a Russian word, and I’ve defined it in an end note of the story that also provides some additional detail on the history discussed.

If you don’t see the link in the title “Prizraki” above, then hover your cursor over the Spy Flash tab at the top of this page and select the story from the drop-down menu. If you’d like to give the Story Cubes Challenge a try, write a story of any length then post a link to it at Jennie Coughlin’s blog.