Two Vingettes

Across the road from my apartment complex are some houses. In one of them, apparently, lives a wrecker. A guy who drives a tow truck, you know? I've seen his truck parked outside the place with some pretty beat up cars. But this morning took the cake. I was walking down the steps to my place and happened to look up and see his latest tow. And stopped cold for a minute before continuing.

You don't often see a tow truck towing a white stretch limo, after all. Especially around here. I didn't see any obvious damage to it, other than a chrome panel missing from under the front door on the passenger side. Maybe it just broke down. Still.

There is a spider in the women's room at work. It's a small spider, maybe a millimeter in any dimension. A tiny brown thing that has a tiny little web at the edge of the stall, between the floor and the wall. There are also small millipedes wandering around various parts of the lab. They are maybe an inch long total, black, and harmless. Yesterday, as I was using the restroom, I noticed that one of these tiny millipedes had been caught by the even tinier spider. The spider was apparently injecting its poison into the millipede because the millipede jerked a little bit now and then. I thought of freeing it, but I figured at that point, it was probably better to leave it. Today, when I went in, there was a second millipede in the web and the body of the first one was on the floor.

Nature, red in tooth and claw, in minature. And I bet no one else has even noticed.