Asphyxiate (Fiction)

***

Iona watches the flame consume the wick. The scent label is something like soymilk and sandalwood, but it smells more like burnt sugar. The house has smelled like something burning for weeks. Long before the lighter beckoned smoke.

Sloane sits across the table. They’ve nearly consumed the seven-pound bottle of wine between them. Iona tends to drink two-thirds while Sloane only gets the first-third, on the first pour. Sloane drinks slowly out of a mug she’s had since college. She likes to hold the wine on her tongue—says she can taste the notes they write on the side of the label. Nectarine, Mediterranean Sea spray, chamomile. Iona thinks the notes could say anything the label makers fancy, and the seven-pound wine would still taste like the cold side of a spoon.

They buy the same bottle every time. The label with the wild trout on it. It reminds both of when they first got together. It was warm once. They haven’t seen the sun in some time. A record player hums something gaudy and slow.

Iona feels that heat in her belly now and in the rounds of her cheeks. A question waits in the back of her throat, a question that has hibernated for weeks. Since she dragged her purple suitcase with the one stuck wheel down the driveway and never brought it back out. Anyways, the question. A question clawing its way up and out along pink ridges. The implications snag on her tongue.

“Sloane?”

“Yea, baby?” Her soft eyes come back into focus. Iona stares at the slice of butter-yellow bang that has fallen out of place.

“What’s wrong with the house?” She says it with a smile on her face to soften the impact. Rounded teeth glisten. Beneath the table she twists the ring on her thumb one, two, seven times around.

“Oh,” is all Sloane says. Her grey eyes soften. Her shoulders curl in on themselves. Iona thinks of a bird concealing itself in feathers, in wings, curling inwards until there is nothing left. Like when her stomach eats at itself, which it does now.

“Not that there’s like, anything wrong with it, I just have noticed some things…and I wasn’t sure if it was just me,” Iona starts.

“It’s not just you. I guess we should talk about it.”

Sloane takes a pull of her wine. The air is dense. Like a fog. Water drips from a faucet in the kitchen, or from the windowsill. It may still be raining. It was when they went outside some time ago.

“The house is sick. I can’t really explain it to you, my love, you won’t understand, really.” Sloane checks her nail-beds as she says this. Flat and wide, the color of bone. Devoid of warmth.

“Oh. Well. We could move? Remember when we used to talk about moving out to the coast? We could.” Iona’s voice flails in the pink cavity of her pawing mouth.

Sloane’s body rigid, eyes wide. “No.” Her voice pointed. A deep shudder runs under the floorboards. Almost imperceptible, except for the wine in Iona’s glass oscillating.

“I can’t leave this house.” She says this, staring at the space between Iona’s eyebrows. Sloane exhales all the air in her upper body. This is all that is left. “You don’t understand, you won’t–”

“Okay. I just thought we talked about being by the ocean one day. And this house has so much empty space, a flat would suit us just fine.”

“I know, baby, and I wish we could. Believe me. But I can’t leave, I can’t.”

Iona leans forward. Her throat tightens.

“If I leave, it will kill me,” says Sloane. “It’s a part of me. I’m a part of it. We’re the same body.”

A fat droplet drips from the ceiling and splats against the hardwood by Iona’s right sock, round and dark like blood.

“It?”

“The house,” Sloane croaks, exasperated. “I need you to stay with me, please. Please, Iona, I need you and if you go, I’ll die anyways. Promise me you can understand, please.” She is desperate. Her fingertips translucent white against the mug. The expression on the trout suddenly less like a cartoon and more like the day’s catch on a chopping board. Eyes lolling at the glint of the decapitating knife.

The chair croaks as Iona gets up. She ignores the tightening knot in her breastbone. “I’d do anything for you.” She takes the mug from Sloane and puts it on the table. Crawls into her lap, nuzzles hot cheek to hot cheek. They sit like this, pressed together, cuticle to a nail-bed. The drip from the ceiling steadies into a regular beat, the droplets fat and heavy. They don’t seem to have a source after all, just an ending. Heat dissipates from the air like the release of a breath.

When Iona goes down the stairs in the morning, maybe a week later, maybe a Thursday, eyes half shut with crust, her foot sticks with something thick like molasses. She rounds the corner towards the kitchen. The white morning light shines off the thick layer of black tar-like ooze that has coated the tile. A flush floods her face, a shock of embarrassment and then guilt for feeling embarrassed. Her first thought is to go back upstairs, peel the sludgy socks from her ankles, curl back around Sloane, sleep until…until…she isn’t sure. 

She trudges to the hall closet, each step producing a moist shhhhlick noise, to gather a mop and rags and towels. She isn’t sure how to proceed with cleaning up the viscous sludge. The mop doesn’t absorb the liquid, just sticks to it and pushes it around. Iona hears something behind her.

“Jesus, you scared me.”

Sloane is standing at the base of the stairs. Skin like paper. She is wearing Iona’s t-shirt from college, the one with the graphic cardinal and hole along the collar.

“I’m sorry.” Her voice hardly above a whisper. Iona feels her heart shudder beneath her sternum.

“Hey, it’s okay, it’s alright. Really,” Iona insists, walking over to her and enveloping her in her arms. She breathes in her hair, feeling the heat from her body. Her fingertips stick to the back of the t-shirt. Sloane swallows hard.

“Let me help you.”

“I’m not really sure the best way to clean it up.”

Sloane doesn’t respond. She wades through to the kitchen and pulls a bucket from beneath the sink. Iona watches her fill it with hot water and dish soap., the sure slope of her shoulder blades. They each take a sponge and begin with the kitchen floor. As the substance lifts, it leaves behind a deep stain on the tile the color of blackberry juice. Or the cough syrup one swallowed as a child.

They work in silence.

After two buckets of solution and four sponges, the residue is gone aside from the stains. Iona turns the shower on and lets steam fill the bathroom. Her forearms are coated thinly by the substance, which has begun to harden like the cooling of candle wax. She chooses to ignore the feeling of suffocation. It’ll pass. Soon to be a forgotten discomfort. Sloane looks less pale than before.

“Come,” Iona instructs. She pulls her college t-shirt over Sloane’s head. Removes her own top. Sloane steps out of her boxers, one leg at a time, then removes her socks. Two stripes on each. Iona steps out of her sweatpants and thinks about throwing them out. The calves are stiff with gunk. She leaves her panties on the sink.

Iona pulls Sloane into the water first, who lets out a soft groan as it hits her. Iona pulls the glass door shut. The steam rises. The bathtub beneath them pools with the substance. The water cuts through the tar in wide rivulets, melting the ooze into a liquid that slithers down the drain.

Iona runs her hands over Sloane’s skin. Soft like loved leather. The hard muscle right beneath. The stretch of her skin, gentle, just enough give beneath the tips of her front teeth.

Sloane brushes the tendrils of wet hair from Iona’s shoulders. Her eyes are solid but searching. Wolfen, Iona’s mother would’ve called them. Iona doesn’t know the last time her mother called. She kisses Sloane’s parted lips. Red heat pulsing her cheeks, hot steam, eyes suddenly hungry and sharp. Fingertips rough, skimming, squeezing, needing. Hands gripping the back of Iona’s neck, the back of her thighs. Mouth wanting forgiveness, wanting submission. The brine of succumbing. The water breaking over their scalps, washing away doubt. Iona’s insides emptied. The knot undone.

The drain gurgles, low and deep.

When Sloane washes Iona’s hair, the shampoo smells sweetly of apple juice. 

They lose the rest of that day, and the next, and another week to the clutch of their comforter, the warm swath of body clinging to body. The sun a memory that breaks onto the carpet.

Sloane sleeps uninterrupted. Iona brushes her blonde locks from her forehead, gleaming and sheened like the plume of an oil spill. Presses cracked lips to the sweet spot. She settles eventually, a tide of slumber pulling her back under.

The house shakes, shudders, groans.  Releases a howl from deep within the wooden constraints. It wakes Iona sometimes, but her body adjusts, learns to let it lull her instead of frighten. Awed by how familiarity can shape anything into comfort.

She wakes to suffocation. Disoriented. Throat raw and scorched.

Grey congealed in the air like a cough. Somehow, more solid than the curling fog Iona might have seen once before.

She feels for Sloane’s body. Her palm meets flat sheets again and again.

“Sloane,” she calls, hardly pronouncing the “slo” before her throat tightens like a fist. Her lungs alight and angry. 

Iona stumbles out of bed and waves her hands in front of her. The mist obeys, separating in slow tendrils. She tries not to cough, but it burns. One hand on the staircase, the other swatting away the fog. It leaves temporarily and drifts right back to fill its space, like the pull of a wave.

She realizes on the third to last step that she isn’t scared. Yellow light from the living room. The fireplace. Sloane’s shape on the couch.

“Sloane,” she says again—but this time, the whole word and everything it means. She shakes her by the shoulders.

“Hmm?” Sloane blinks slowly and begins to rise.

Iona’s chest strains. The fog is coagulated in the center of the room, above the couch, a dark grey well sucking every atom of oxygen from the air. She stumbles half beneath and half through it, towards the window, pries it open from the bottom up. It shrieks. Opens. Her lungs drink deep, the cold from the air slicing inside of her.

“Baby?”

“The fireplace, the fog…” Iona begins to question. She leans her head against the glass.

“What? Are you alright?”

Iona looks behind her. Sloane is sitting up halfway, her stomach pale and exposed. The room is emptied of smoke. It left through the window in a silent exit.

“The fireplace…you must have fallen asleep…”

“Fire? I didn’t light a fire. I came down to read, but I knocked out. Did you have a bad dream?” She pushes her hair back from her forehead as she says this.

“I woke up because I couldn’t breathe. And you,” she falters. Iona resents that she falters. “You weren’t there. The house was filled with smoke. I couldn’t breathe.”

Sloane’s shoulders fall. “Come here,” she mouths.

Iona comes.

Three nights or two weeks later, they have sex so beautiful it brings tears to Iona’s eyes. It is when her exhale and Sloane’s inhale blend to one breath and later, when Iona notices she has one sock off and one slid half down her heel, that she decides she doesn’t want for anything. What more could wanting be if not for this?

“You want tea?” Sloane asks, stroking the ends of her hair, which is longer than it’s ever been.

“Yes, with–” she starts, and Sloane leaves the room. “With the honey,” Iona finishes. She rolls onto her side and tucks her knees to her chin. Stares at the indent of Sloane’s body in the sheets beside her. Only a floor separating them. She feels less complete somehow.

Iona wakes covered in goosebumps, the groan of the woodwork fresh in her ears. She pulls on two jumpers and sweatpants and trods downstairs, tucking her fingers to the heat of her neck.

“Hey, I didn’t want to wake you. You looked so peaceful.” Sloane is at the dining table, a collection of tragedies by Euripides cracked beneath her fingers.

“The tea?” Iona asks.

“Our pipes are frozen. The tap won’t run. I’m sorry.”

Iona glances towards the window, a sheet of white. When did it snow? Wasn’t it June? Iona crosses the room, feels the lick of chill threaten her beneath the layers. Her breath hardly a wet spot on the glass.

She can’t open the window.

“Don’t open them, it’s freezing.” Sloane muses, the sides of her mouth twisted.

Iona shoves harder, uses all the brunt of her shoulders. The window doesn’t budge.

“I opened them just the other day,” she muses.

“Baby, they’ve been frozen over for a while. Since the snowstorm, probably.”

Iona stares at the window. Her hands drop to her sides. The white is so consuming there is no reflection from the glass anymore.

She closes her parted lips and sits gingerly on the floor, resting her head on Sloane’s thigh. Everything stills.

“Read to me?”

Sloane begins to read, and Iona listens. The house braces.

Olivia Wieland is a writer based in Brooklyn, NY. Her publications include a chapbook, To Be the Candle or the Mirror That Reflects It, published by Bottlecap Press, as well as creative nonfiction and fiction pieces in VERDANT Journal, Short Beasts, and 805Lit. A forthcoming fiction piece was shortlisted for the 2026 Leopold Bloom Prize for Innovative Narration.