Title: Pink Steam Author: Dodie Bellamy Publisher: Suspect Thoughts For me, it's Selsun Blue shampoo, that weirdly-acrid anti-dandruff smell that's left behind, days after rinsing. In the middle of a shopping mall, one sniff of a pimply teenage's drieid-out locks, and I'm 16 again, wanking in the same bed as my best friend sleeps too close and too far away. For the narrator of "Can You Hear Me, Major Tom?", we recall, "He was twenty-one, two years younger than me. In my tiny bedroom he rubbed my back with coconut scented lotion, and to this day whenever I smell coconut, I get all sentimental, overcome with an ambient eroticism I don't know what to do with." Bowie may have been right, and the stars do look very different today, but the passing scents that make sense still are righteous in their power. As are Bellamy's words (stories would be too coherent, tales not nearly as fragmentary, narrations only doing so much because objectivity was burnt at the stake long ago), magnificent in their corporeality, fragrant in their hyper-reality. She's pulled up the corpses of Acker and Burroughs, fucked them twice over and washed Bill's mouth out with pussy juice for good measure, then injected the goop that remained after the bodies were reverently placed back in their capsules. "The underpants are ripped in front, as if someone has slashed them with a knife. My pubic hair shows through, it is red, and I play with it, absently, like a person clicking a ballpoint." Ordinary. Quotidian. Beautifully fucked. If you're looking for closure or continuity, poke your eyes out. Here remain positions, reactions, "I, in my very pale very stainable shirt, curl away to the left like a disjointed comma longing for its clause." You want nasty? "Eventually the [high-school] girls go pregnant - their cunts were made of bubble gum, sperm blew inside them swell their bellies enormous. The boyfriends took back their rings." The Rules are raped, one by one. Literally. Figuratively. Fantastically. "Shit is the oxygen of your literary atmosphere." And so... it is written.