Summary of And We Shall Find Rest by James Sallis
Asimov’s Science Fiction, January/February 2026
Six bodies are discovered behind Clifford’s, a vintage toy store that sells nostalgia in the form of Hopalong Cassidy lunch boxes, GI Joe action figures, model trains, and Hot Wheels. The narrator and Rudy, co-owners of the shop, call Retrieval to collect the dead, but are told it will be four days before they can get to them. This presents a problem: the bodies are blocking the back entrance that most customers use, and a group of international buyers is arriving soon.
The practical solution is to move the bodies into the abandoned beauty supply store next door, Suzie’s, whose broken delivery door can be opened with a hard push. The corpses are temporarily relocated among eyelashes, mascara, foundation, and hair color products—”at the spa, as it were.” Nobody knows what’s killing people, and at this point, nobody really cares. Everyone is simply waiting their turn.
The international buyers arrive by bus wearing facemasks and breather tanks, resembling huge insects with their ectomorph bodies and loosely articulated joints. They’re described as two rival groups that somehow support and benefit each other. Despite the apocalyptic circumstances, they’re avid shoppers, and within hours each group has selected an expansive bundle of vintage toys. The sale brings in more money than the store would normally make in half a year—a splash of black ink in desperate times.
Key Plot Points
- The narrator feels “the way an apple must feel right before it falls”—ripe, purposeful, but also having to say goodbye to the life they know
- While preparing inventory and filling out endless bureaucratic paperwork (tax forms, capital relocation, export forms), they celebrate with champagne and check on the bodies
- Someone has rearranged the corpses into a circle with a bottle in the center—set up for a game of spin the bottle—which in their champagne-tinged state seems “pretty damn funny”
- At home, the narrator finds their partner Carl taking a bubble bath and reading poetry—Berryman—trying to understand why the narrator finds this particular grouping comforting
- The next morning, Retrieval arrives unexpectedly with a cancelation, and the bodies have been rearranged again overnight into “compromising positions”
The story is set in a world where death has become commonplace but infrastructure stubbornly persists—half the population and most of the government is gone, but bureaucracy lingers. The narrator imagines a lone civil servant in a basement office, the last of their kind, bureaucracy itself only fading when that final person dies. People have developed the instinct of dying cats and wild animals, going away from the community to die somewhere out of sight, which is why you don’t see bodies on the street much anymore.
Small domestic moments anchor the horror: Carl and the narrator’s comfortable routines, their gentle banter about romance and charm, preparing dinner together with Carl insisting the fish must “glide on the pan, not be a weight on it.” The narrator changes into comfort clothes. They scrounge for dinner. These tiny acts of normalcy persist even as the world collapses around them.
The Retrieval workers arrive in what looks like an old bread delivery truck, its interior fitted with broad shelves from front to back, most already full by ten in the morning. The driver has been doing this work since “it all started” and claims you wouldn’t believe the stuff they see. The narrator resists the sudden urge to thank them for their service—perhaps because the gesture would acknowledge too much, make the apocalypse too real, or because thanking people for collecting corpses seems absurd.
The story concludes with a haunting parallel: just as the Retrieval workers carry away bodies, couriers will come to carry away the vintage toys that foreign buyers have purchased. Others will come for model cars, rare coins, antique violins, art—all the things “for which we’ll soon enough have no use.” In this dying world, nostalgia is still being bought and sold, people still conduct business, fill out forms, and maintain routines. The apocalypse is not dramatic but mundane, characterized not by panic but by a weary acceptance—a quiet saudade, that Portuguese yearning for something so indefinite as to be inexpressible, for the world that was and the lives being slowly, bureaucratically, inevitably lost.