We Were Just Playing [Fiction | Historical] by Sevastian Winters

We Were Just Playing is a quiet, devastating story told through the eyes of a child who doesn’t fully understand the world shifting around her—only that the rules are changing. Set in a tent colony in early-20th-century America, the story unfolds through small moments: games in the dirt, whispered warnings, men with guns, and the uneasy feeling that something is coming. What begins as an ordinary day slowly tightens into something darker, seen only in fragments and half-understood truths. This is not a story about history as it’s recorded—but history as it’s lived, felt, and survived by those too young to be protected from it.