The Devil Went Down to Tbilisi
The devil could read every thought on the planet at once, but he gave a particular focus to Gregori Ivanov. He ran a newspaper kiosk in Tbilisi, an unheated one. The winds would whip through his kiosk, disturbing the newspapers. “Stop, you pest,” he muttered to the wind in Georgian. When it rained, he took the papers inside the narrow booth so they’d stay dry, but people would assume he didn’t have newspapers and would walk by without giving him any money. “You’re worse than a month-long hangover,” he muttered. Whenever it wasn’t raining, the papers would go outside, weighed down by rocks, but in this wind even those rocks were threatening to be overturned. He was freezing to death in the dark kiosk, and his papers were going to be littering half the city. “God,” he muttered with the devil watching on the edge of ecstasy, “I’d sell my soul if this wind would stop.” The devil screamed with pleasure. The wind stopped. Gregori looked around, smiled a little bit, and continued on with his day. It would be 43 years before Gregori’s death, upon which he would get a big surprise.