A Bar in Amsterdam

Flash fiction, inspired by Katzenjammer song

This is a musically themed flash-fiction and another submission to MJ Polk’s Stories from the Jukebox. This week’s song was “A Bar in Amsterdam” by the Norwegian all-female alt-rock band, Katzenjammer. Join us for weekly song-based writing prompts!

During this “wintering” (organizing) of my writing backlog, I’m truly enjoying writing shorts and one-offs. In this story, I incorporated the song’s the lyrics (bolded) and themes. It was fun to write and really fun to learn more about music while writing.

Thanks so much for being here for the eclectic mix of memoir, fiction, poetry, and prose, from my inescapable behaviorist lens! Hope you enjoy this one.

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Photo by Kateryna Melnyk on Unsplash

It’s cold and damp in the attic of this God-forsaken house.

We sit, you and I, back to back, bracing for their entrance from either side. I have a steel guitar, meant for fretting. You have an electric drum, meant for pounding.

Mary? She sits, ethereal, on her mattress in the corner, ready to play the triangle in a way that’d make Pythagoras forget he ever theorized. That is to say, she’s a soon-to-be loser like us, immaculate heart notwithstanding. Winning and losing come down to who’s heard, and no one’s listened for Tinkerbell since Peter Pan lost his youth.

The rain clatters on the roof and drips through our veins, quickening the beat of our breath – in, out, allegro agitato!

“Remember that bar in Amsterdam?” The whisper of your voice cuts the polyphonic reverb.

You know I don’t remember the bar in Amsterdam! You were on your trip; I was on mine.

“Yeah, I remember.” The end is near; why not tell you what you want to hear? My truth shan’t kill you, Immanuel!

The only thing I remember of that bar in Amsterdam is the music. Me on guitar, you on drums. Oh! And I was made of rubber bands; you were a cloud of staccato beetles. Neither of us were any good, but, together, we were loud. These days, that’s all that’s needed to be heard —volume, not talent. We were ahead of our time.

Thunder claps its calloused hands above the roof, shaking bones of a structure that, despite occupation, sat silent and un-beheld, like when we found Mary lying there. Assumptions, assumptions; such rapturous illusions, taking no one but the observed!

Downstairs, something slams — a door, a window, or the first boot of the storm climbing the stairs.

Mary’s apparition lifts the triangle. A tiny ding defies the safety of silence, like sworn pits of violence.

You turn on your drum and tap it once; its tinny beat attacks the air with textured precision. A paced

                                   boom
                                        boom
                                               boom 

sets the tempo for hearts that should fight!

I slide my fingers along the nickel-wound strings. There’s nothing we can say that can lead them astray, so what else is there to do but play?

Louder than beetles, louder than bones. 
Louder than a house settling the debt of home. 
Louder than Amsterdam and all of Siam, 
we play faster and LOUDER until the doors come down! 

Finally, the storm hears us. Winning and losing, after all, come down to who’s heard.

Somewhere, Pythagoras appreciates the cosmic harmony of human dissonance.

Photo by Teo Zac on Unsplash

The end.

You can leave the piece there, or read on, for some non-fiction. :)

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Author’s Attic Notes

A Bar in Amsterdam was new to me, but I loved it. Thanks for choosing it and introducing us to Katzenjammer, Pasqua's Shack! I’m a big fan of all-female alt-rock bands. Veruca Salt, L7, Bikini Kill —rock me into Neverland!

The song was full of cultural references that I tried to incorporate, along with lyrics that stuck out — the attic, storm, fight, Mary the “loser like me”, etc. Given the lyrics allude to an impending fight to the death, I also inserted some religious themes around Mary and referenced the philosopher Immanuel Kant. (Kant’s quote, “If the truth shall kill them, let them die.”) And I intentionally left a little mystery, like the song (is the narrator on drugs? who are they hiding from?). Oh, and did you catch the Pythagoras reference? Did you know music theory began with Pythagoras? He needed to be in there, somewhere.

So, basically, I layered it with elements a surface-reader won’t appreciate. But you do! Thanks for seeing me. My brain person would rot if I didn’t entertain her!

If you’re new here, I usually try to offer some behavioral-psych tidbits in any given piece. Here, there are subtleties about stimulus control embedded in the story, but I don’t want to get into weeds. Instead, here’s a behavioral reframe, for whomever can glean from it (and an Easter-egg hyperlink):

Sometimes, I get down on myself for devoting my writing time to one-offs like this — I’ve got a backlog that isn’t organizing or book-making itself!! Then I remind myself, I love writing one-offs! Plus, my creativity flows from variation in stimuli, responding, and reinforcers.¹ So, I zoom out, behaviorally, and see that my “scattered” responding is just hitting more notes than most. What I do with respect to “writing” is broad in range, thus slow-paced towards any one end. And that’s okay, for me.

If you’re here explicitly for the behavioral tidbits, please check out my notes (activity feed) and the ends of other posts. Also, check out my other two publications!

Thanks for reading, always!

Peace, love, and stimulus control,

Jennifer

A note to email subscribers: Thank you so much for your time. I try to limit the number of emails you recieve, so if you only read by email, you only get about 10% of what I post. I have lots more poetry, shorts, shares, etc. — lots of dissemination of behaviorism in unique ways — in the app, in notes/ my activity feed. Did you know you can turn off email notifications in the app? Or that, from email, if you press the heart outline at the top of this email, it registers as a “like” on my end? Just saying ;)

AI disclosure: 100% human! No AI used to generate. Gemini was used to fact-check and research. I came here to read human writing and connect with real people.

1. Kubina Jr, R. M., Morrison, R. S., & Lee, D. L. (2006). Behavior analytic contributions to the study of creativity. The Journal of creative behavior, 40(4), 223-242. PDF linked above. Open access! More where this came from; just lmk if you’re interested!