Tale of the Week 290: Colonialism - Winner's Circle

**Turkafinwë** · April 14, 2019, 10:41 AM

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Colonialism

With thanks to Alwyn

for the graphic from his Empire TW AAR:Kite Pèp Mwen An Ale: Let My People Go (Haiti AAR)! Please rep him by clicking on the little green cross.

After a tense voting period it is time we announce the winner of this Tale of the Week! Congratulations to Hitai de Bodemloze for his victory in this hardfought Competition with many a great adversary. Hitai receives one Writers' Study Competition Point bringing his total up to a absolutely stunning 35 points.

If you missed a chance to read the storyboard you can read Hitai's winning entry below:

TotW 290: Colonialism - WINNING SUBMISSION He watched as Mimi casually lit a cigarette, reclining on the battered scarlet chaise longue in the corner of the hotel room. The establishment was one of the last of its kind now in Hong Kong, as new companies from the mainland began to buy up and renovate the tawdry hotels that had marked their youth, encroaching like vipers upon those cherished memories of the sixties. It was tough for natives like them, who had grown up under the moonlight of those wild nights in the hotel cabaret bars, dressed to the nines in decadence and wanton abandon, dancing drunkenly away to that American swing before retiring somewhere a little more private to explore what lay beneath their laced corsets and debonair coattails. Now they had to watch as the Chinese conglomerates, in their savage ignorance, began to dismantle everything unique about the world's last colony, driving people like Mimi and him further underground.

They met now, when they could, at this hotel; the last oasis of their youth where she had once plied her trade. But it was just an echo now of those heady days long past. He looked at her, her fishnet stockings protruding from the hem of an elaborate dress, dangling over the edge of the worn out leather sofa. Smoke clung in the air, dancing with the dust in the light of a new dawn spiking in from behind the tattered window shutters. She turned to smile at him, and he saw properly for the first time the lines of her face tug in contortion; a pattern of wrinkles now upon what once had been such an angel's visage.

But he still loved her, just as he loved Hong Kong. Yet that was the true tragedy of it, he supposed. What he loved had long since faded, and what he clung to now was but a ghost of times past. But he couldn't let go, not now. So as Hong Kong crumbled away into modernity, he took the hand of the woman he had once loved, and held her for one last dance in the shadowed vestige of their youth.

A big thank you to everyone who submitted an entry and/or voted in the poll on behalf of all the WS Staff. Thank you all!

TotW 290: Submission thread | Voting thread

For those who feel renewed and invigorated by the passing of winter and the coming of spring can jump right into the subject of our next Competition; Tale of the Week 291: Renewal. Or perhaps you are inspired by something entirely different and you'll give your story a lovely twist to it, either way do check out the submissions thread of our next Tale of the Week.