Still Fighting by Daria Lishchyshyna

 He showed up every morning at the same bench

by the train tracks, always slumped at the far end, like the wood barely tolerated his weight. He smelled like an old fridge left open in the sun — a mix of sweat, rot, and something sour that made you want to stop breathing. His hair was greasy and stuck together, and his shirt was covered in stains that looked weeks old. He scratched himself slowly, not caring that his nails were black with dirt. When he talked, his breath was so bad it felt like something had died in his mouth.

Kids crossed the street to avoid him. Shopkeepers frowned if he lingered nearby. One woman once asked him to move, her voice tight and polite, but firm. He didn’t reply — just looked at her with bleary eyes and slowly picked at the hole in his pants until she left.

People called him “Crawler.” It was the way he walked — a slow, dragging shuffle like his feet had forgotten how to lift. Rumours followed him like shadows. That he’d been in prison. That he was dangerous. That he talked to himself — or worse, to voices that weren’t there.

That’s when I looked again. Not at his smell or his clothes, but at his eyes. And for a flicker of a second, they weren’t dull. They were sharp. Haunted. laziness. There was an old burn on his thumb. His wrists were sun-scarred, but bore the faint trace of a long-removed watch. On his forearm—a faded tattoo: “Blood type: O+.” And below it, a serial number. Not from prison. Military.

And then it clicked.

While we were celebrating graduations, he was probably lying in foreign sand, staring at the sky through a rifle sight. While we complained about boring lectures, he might have been burying a friend under gunfire. While we slept in safety—he counted seconds until dawn, hoping the next ambush wouldn’t come.

Now he just sits. Like a forgotten statue of heroism no one cares for any more.

What repels us at first glance may hide something deep, painful, and true. People are not what they seem. Sometimes the worst-smelling man on the bench is a soldier who’s still fighting a war no one sees.