Three novellas, Teresa Carmody’s Today Must Be Sunday, Kim Chinquee’s I Thought of England, and Allison Pitinii Davis’s Business, unique in style and narrative, deal with longing, loneliness, fear, and the relationships their characters make, and break, on their way to something like peace, if not happiness. Entering and abandoning social contracts and expectations across the country in the pursuit of the somewhat ethereal notion of contentment, these stories highlight the struggles of women across American cultural eras, armed only with their ability to think and to act. These three novellas describe the harrowing, soul-rattling actions and choices made by women in the pursuit of defining their lives.

Excerpta from Agency 3

from Teresa Carmody’s Today Must Be Sunday:

Three years before physical health wellness checks became a temporary daily requirement on many college campuses

I moved to Florida and began living like the elderly I’d long admired. I went to bed early and woke throughout the night, sometimes making a cup of coffee to sip in bed while reading and listening to the birds and cicadas in the surrounding live oaks. During the day, I napped for one, two, or three hours, sweating and dreaming ghosts before finally pushing myself up to drink a cup of tea and eat a graham cracker with a bit of peanut butter (if I was feeling nostalgic), or a smear of orange marmalade (if I was in a frisk). I clipped coupons and took advantage of buy-one-get-one-free offers at the local grocery store. Kosher pickles. Olive oil. English muffins. I walked the dogs around the block, stopping to peer into store-front windows at antiques and knick-knacks. I watched squirrels and small lizards run from one bit of green to another. I tried to know my neighbors, but this proved difficult for reasons I slowly understood.

Pops, the older gentleman to my west, died before I arrived, though his body may have been in the medical examiner van I passed that afternoon in late June when I arrived in the middle of a downpour. It took all of July and August for someone, I’m not sure who, to clear the house, sell the truck, mend the rotting wood railing on the front porch. Groups of people arrived, never the same ones twice it seemed, to mow, haul, or sign papers.

On my other side lived a woman who looked older than she was. In the cooler parts of the day, she sat on her screened-in porch, drinking iced tea and smoking cigarettes, often with a dime-store novel in hand. At first, I waved enthusiastically every time I saw her, and in those early weeks, I thought she was returning the pleasantry, so that when I finally met her on the sidewalk one bright muggy morning, I introduced myself with a broad smile. She kept her gaze fixed on the sidewalk as she spit the word “Mary” and rushed to her porch. Ah, I thought, what a wonderful coincidence, for Mary was also the name of the six-year-old girl who lived across the street and of my small dog, a tan and white cocker spaniel perpetually in search of food. I’ve moved to the land of Marys, I texted to a friend, though I soon understood that the woman next door wasn’t waving at me but shooing fruit flies or mosquitoes. Or perhaps she was trying to make me and my two dogs disappear, for Shirley—her actual name, I later learned—did not like me. She refused my smiles and I could feel her increasing annoyance with me as she sat, day in day out, in her dirty white wicker chair.

Two incidents confirmed this suspicion. One morning, as she was sitting on her porch and I was returning from a walk, my wonderfully alert and playful German Shepherd sniffed and peed on the edge of Shirley’s lawn, and the old woman began loudly exclaiming—“Mary and Gary, Mary and Gary”—taunting in the kind of sing-song tone I generally associated with schoolyard bullies. I was surprised and initially amused, as the big dog isn’t named Gary, though I once wrote a novel about a teenage girl from the Midwest who traveled to Florida with her Aunt Mary and Uncle Gary. So how extraordinary that my neighbor paired these names in this State, as if she could perceive, within my present-tense shimmer, something already written, soon to be published. She’s like a nasty oracle, I later wrote. Or maybe oracles are always tricky this way—seemingly mad, easy to scorn.

from Allison Pitinii Davis’s Business:

SPRING, 1978

My father and I drove across town to drop off the sheets we had finished washing. The sun above Southside Plaza glinted in his aviators. His workpants were stiffly pressed. Around Glenwood Avenue, I said, “Nice afternoon.”

“Sure,” he said, tapping his cigarette outside the window.

My cousin Mike usually went with him on deliveries — my father didn’t like sending his daughters into clients’ businesses. But Mike was busy with orders, so I rode the twenty minutes beside him until we pulled into the lot of a small trucking motel. A neon sign towered over the property and cast a shadow along the roof, which tilted up at a midcentury slant. Behind the lot, large enough to be seen from the interstate, rose a billboard that said motel. My father parked and left the engine running as we unloaded clean sheets from the back of the van and carried them past motel rooms numbered 5 to 1.

Inside the office, my father dropped a stack of wrapped sheets on the check-in counter. The motel was owned by Jews, which I knew not because of the Jewish star on the 1977-1978/5738 calendar by the phone, but because of the idiotic Jew jokes my uncle told me back at the laundry. Besides the calendar, there were no other markers of culture. One wall of the office was taken up by a large window facing the semitrucks coming off the interstate. Beside it was a sliding window: the beer and wine drive-thru. The beer and wine itself stood in coolers that lined the far wall like the inside of a gas station. Behind the counter, the innkeeper, a tall, bearded man in a pair of jeans and a baseball hat, read The Vindicator in a stained La-Z-Boy. He and my father nodded to each other before my father headed out for the next load. I added my sheets to the stack on the

counter and said, “From the laundry,” but the innkeeper only folded the newspaper in half, tossed it down on the desk, and went into the back room.
A moment later, a girl emerged, a pencil between her teeth and a bag of ice in either arm. She wore a white dress and looked my age, mid-twenties. She was tall like the innkeeper. One manicured hand wore an engagement ring with a diamond skirting her knuckle. Her posture gave you the feeling that she was the first in many generations of her line who didn’t wear pearls. As if they were internalized. She began unloading the ice into a freezer with a have a nice day! sign, her dark curls shining under the fluorescents. Does she think this is the Miss America pageant? I thought, feeling suddenly plain in my jeans and T-shirt. I tried to run a hand through my perm. I resented her, instantly.

The ice put away, she spit out the pencil, stuck out her hand, and announced the name that would, by November, ruin my family’s business.

“Lia Mazur.”

“Alexa Mavros.” I shook her hand hard, hoping to crush it, but her grip was stronger than mine. Her smile seemed to widen with victory.

The screen door slammed open and my father dropped another stack of clean sheets on the counter. Lia motioned toward the door creaking shut behind him.

“Your father?” she asked.

I nodded.

She smiled. “Has anyone ever told you he looks just like John Cassavetes? I always think, here comes John Cassavetes, our laundry man.”

I would have told her that not all Greek people look the same except for the fact that he did look like John Cassavetes — clean-shaven, tormented. So, I said nothing as she smoothed her shirtdress and regally took a seat beside the Marlboro cigarette display and drugstore perennials. Her father — who didn’t look like any movie star I could think of — returned with sacks of used bed linens, the weight of which my father took effortlessly to his stomach. I grabbed another load and followed him back out to the van, the room numbers on the doors adding back up beside him.

from Kim Chinquee’s I Thought of England:

I meet John at a birthday thing for a guy he went to school with, Rex, a guy I’m trying to like. Rex hunches. He smiles all the time. He wears his glasses crooked. He always pays. He doesn’t wear ties but looks like a man who would. There are always men to choose from.

John’s tall. He doesn’t seem afraid of anything. I wasn’t into that like twenty years before, but I imagine John and Rex in high school, John probably always trying to make Rex feel better about himself. Rex seems to need that, but who am I?

***

After the party, Rex walks me to the corner, waltzing his feet to kiss me. I let him kiss me. It’s nothing, really. I met Rex at the same place where I used to come with Pip, a colleague of mine who also eventually kissed me. He ended up in Texas to be with his wife. They decided to work things out. I like the guy. He still calls sometimes.

I say goodbye to Rex, walking the rest of the way home. Rex is practically my neighbor. The city is big, but the neighborhoods seem tiny.

I go home to Ted’s stuff. He’s my ex-boyfriend. He’s away, visiting another state, where he has business. We’re supposed to be friends. He says sex gets in the way of things. We broke up mostly because of that.

***

John sends me an email. I remember his smile. He seems happy. I want to be happy. He told Rex and me he’s married. He has two boys.

He hugged me before he left the birthday thing. He said, Mmmm.

I’m not desperate.

John texts, writes, calls. He says he wants to meet me. I answer lol, and lol and lol. We flirt a little. He asks me to the races.

Book Details

Title: Agecny 3: Novellas

Author: Teresa Carmody, Kim Chinquee, Allison Pitinii Davis

Publication Date: September 9, 2025

Trade Paperback

5.5 x 8.5

250 pages

ISBN: 978-1-936097-62-3

$19.95

Dist. by Publishers Group West
www.pgw.com, 800-788-2123

Available at your favorite local bookstore, on bookshop.org, and wherever books are sold.