How long I?ve resisted I don't know. Fire and ice, rain and snow, hail and stones, fast food and slow lanes, high tide and low morale. I?m weathered and scarred and deep-grooved and thick-skinned and scorched, but I?m still standing, like the other guy said, after all these years. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But how come? I?ve seen others, bronze creatures with iron jaws and titanium chins, fall down like little plastic bricks at Domino Day. I?ve seen giants fold and colossuses yield, I witnessed how they were torn off the resilient earth and blown away, arms and legs flailing like the limbs of fledglings thrown out the nest by their angry brothers. And what did I do, when those mountains of muscles crumbled, when those sinews snapped like twigs between a child's fingers, when those thick hearts stopped pumping, when a yellowish, vitreous glaze covered those steely eyes? I smiled with my crooked smile. I went back to sleep. I bade my time.

I was born the weakest wimp, the weediest wisp. I was born in the shade of my betters, who would never cast down their eyes to look at me, because my very insignificance would have reminded them that I was standing on the ground that was theirs. But their ignorance was my luck. I fed on the crumbs they left behind. I drank in the mud puddles formed by their footprints. I bathed in the little patches of sun they forgot in their wake. Because I was small, I didn't need much. I learnt patience and perseverance. I learnt the arts of wiliness and dissimulation. I became invisible, no more than the shadow's shadow. My skin became bark.

When the winter came, I was ready. The storms started their long, dark, howling journeys in our lands. I had long know where to hide and my