The Paso Doble

Out there in the cyber world there’s another life we can go to when the one we’ve got isn’t much fun. 

The metaverse of Second Life is fascinating, absurd, obscene, hilarious and liberatingly anonymous.  When a Spanish man approaching middle age and an Australian woman already beyond it meet there, they abandon the usual underpinnings of personal interactions – things like honesty and decency and sincerity. 

Despite being separated by a generation, by their life experiences and half the globe, the dubious friendship Tomas and Meg find in Second Life offers each of them an opportunity to escape their real lives and be for a time the beautiful, carefree, shapely youngsters they imagine they’d like to be.

Tomas’s work takes him away from his home in Barcelona for most of the week. He is losing his place in his family and suspects his wife is having an affair. He is infatuated with a workmate to whom he inadvertently delivers an appalling insult; while he struggles to make amends, alone in hotel rooms he alleviates his loneliness by visiting Second Life in the guise of his avatar, ‘Frankie Corrado’. 

Meg has hidden herself from the world in her suburban home in Australia, traumatised by witnessing a car accident and disgusted by her own reaction to it. She has confined herself to a wheelchair to avoid engaging with the real world and passes time in Second Life where her avatar, ‘Angie’, meets Tomas’s Frankie. Her husband is well-meaning but irritating and the world outside is threatening. So keen is she to escape it she is beginning to lose track of reality. 

But Second Life also has darker depths of misrepresentation and misinterpretation that endanger its real life users. Despite the escapism and fun they find there, Meg and Tomas come close to causing themselves emotional damage before the real world reclaims them, for better or for worse.



About the Author: 

Christina Mowle is an editor, journalist and author of three novels and many short stories. 

She has an active involvement in visual arts and crafts and lives in Melbourne, Australia, with her cat and a husband.