Bill Baynes's Reviews > Tiny Shoes Dancing and Other Stories

Tiny Shoes Dancing, the new story collection from Audrey Kalman, presents the private moments and personal fears of ordinary Americans. Her credible, recognizable characters are not always nice, not always human and not often happy.

A runner falls and wonders whether anyone will ever find her. A girl boots her cheating spouse like her mother did her father. A husband reincarnates as a dog and tries to get his wife to “own” him. A makeup artist makes out with an underwear model. A man has to force himself to get out of bed.
In the powerful This Ain’t No Fairy Tale, Kalman paints a haunting portrait of a child without hope, the women who worry about him and a suburban matron who wants to help him.

Don’t look for happy endings here. Don’t look for endings at all. Kalman shows us people talking past each other, people who can’t get out of their own way, the quietly desperate, the disconnected.

She is an assured writer with a voice that ranges from the lyrical to the surreal to the cruel. She is never predictable. Her vivid imagery is scattered throughout these twenty stories. A woman feels “the cool feather of her grandmother’s breath of her cheek.” A neighborhood is “like a snoozing cat under the sun.” Slum apartments are built “of brown bricks … like stacks of shit.”

This is strong stuff. You start watching people at the supermarket, speculating about their inner demons, half-expecting an encounter.

Kalman can do that.