Black-Eyed Susan

Susan sits smoking at a corner table in a bright, noisy coffee shop. It’s a place she would not be caught dead in, and so it is exactly the place she needs right now, a place no one expects her to be, where no one would ever look for her. They know her well here, well enough to no longer know her as anything but Susan.

She was born Susan 20 years ago, and she stayed Susan—happy blonde Susan—until she was in junior high school and started running with a group of kids who made teen angst into a fashion statement. She started wearing black vintage clothes, Doc Martens, black lipstick, and dark eye shadow. She dyed her hair black, then tinted it purple or deep red as the mood took her. She began living her life as if it were death, pretending every day was a funeral. She began spelling her name Sioux-Zen.

Sad, tragic Sioux-Zen and her sad, tragic friends listened to the Smiths, Siouxsie and the Banshees, New Order, the Cure, Rasputina, and a lot of other bands that looked and dressed and thought (or pretended to think) like they did. They didn’t fit in with the metalheads, or the stoners, or any of the other cliques in school, and they wore this as a tragic badge, too. They played at witchcraft and vampirism; they dabbled in acid and Ecstasy. While everyone else went to Daytona Beach or Fort Lauderdale for Spring break, Sioux-Zen and her goth friends went to New Orleans to haunt the French Quarter after midnight and the cities of the dead at dawn.

Susan asks Rose, the waitress who was once a hippie and so understands, for another cup of coffee. It's not cappuccino (they don’t have it here); it's just plain old Maxwell House. Black.

Author’s note: Character study based on the song “Black-Eyed Susan” by Morrissey

© 2025 Brian G. Parker