River, Her Two Iterations, and the Animal Collective
or a Rupture in the Internal Garden
written by: Andrew Buckner
Throughout time, the blue-eyed woman with the “wild” blonde hair and the vine-like stature had many names. During the Paleolithic era, when she rode on the backs of woolly mammoths into battle against the men who wanted to slay her and slept in a circle of saber-toothed cats every night, she was known by a long, peaceful sound that is best described as a sigh of relief.
In medieval times, she was a simple farmer, the only one who spoke up for the welfare of the cows, sheep, pigs, and chickens around her. For this heartfelt act, Ivy, as she was then called, was remembered, cherished, and protected as eras unfolded by the ancestors of the animals for which she so courageously fought.
In 2025, during a century where such wildlife was seen as food, a pet, or a mere hindrance, River Sage, as the woman, who always appeared to be around twenty-one years of age, was then called, would find all of the creatures, whether they were domesticated or not, following her wherever she went.
She knew that animals, especially dogs and cats, were often said to be able to sense when someone was a good person. River knew that, despite how she treated these animals and their ancestors who had followed her for the past 2.5 million years, they were doing so out of loyalty. River was a permanent part of the pack of all inhuman creatures.
“If only mankind had such ability to see beyond their differences and unify,” River would think to herself as she slumbered with snakes in their dens for sleep at night and watched humans who she suspected of harboring negative thoughts towards the creatures that had been by her side throughout her various lifetimes during the day.
This deliberation, one which seemed so simple on the surface, but River believed would never be realized by mankind as a whole as she watched them fall into and out of their endless wars and political spats and vain quests for wealth and self-preservation throughout the millennia, was echoing throughout her head on the frosty morning of December 4th at 11:36 a.m. when the garden in her stomach, the place where snakes and other intestine-like creatures could crawl in her belly, like a baby in utero, and emotionally and physically heal themselves, whether from any wounds the world willingly or unwillingly inflicted upon these wondrous entities, opened up unexpectedly.
Falling to her knees and gripping her stomach, what initially looked like a small garter snake spilled out of River’s internal garden. She tried to put the fleshy folds of her belly back together. Still, the hellish entity kept coming outwards in an endless line of gory, slimy, slithering scales. She cried out in anguish towards a god or goddess that she knew from thousands of years of experience that didn’t exist, as the beast kept falling from where it was coiled near her heart and moving out towards the human habitats that were about a mile from the woods in Lion’s Paw, Ohio, where this surreal scene was taking place.
“You, like all mothers, will not be responsible for the potentially wicked actions of the entity for which you will one day give birth,” River remembered a wise man telling her in a series of knocks and clicks during her Paleolithic days. “It is not a reflection of who you are. You have and will always continue to pour all of your love into both the animals who share your affections and into the people who ignore you and won’t bother to understand you despite all you do for them. It will be the same chain of events all parents face with their offspring. At first, your child will rebel. He may even seem evil, frightening, and unwieldy. You must give him space and trust his intentions. Soon, after he’s grown and matured, he will come back to you. Use the language of the beasts, that of love and patience, and he will return to you in the manner that you wish of his disposition.”
These words echoed throughout River’s head as the end of the tail of the beast she had birthed, Pax, which is both the Latin word for “peace” and the attitude she desperately wished in that moment that the entity would adopt in his life, slowly crept out of her open stomach, River’s internal garden. Once the snake-like organism had entirely departed River’s stomach, the cavity then zipped itself shut as if by invisible hands.
River watched wordlessly, as if it were a scene from a movie, as the tip of Pax’s ruddy tail followed in one long line with the rest of his approximately two-hundred-foot body.
From the kaiju films River had watched with Akira Matsumoto, a sixteen-year-old Japanese woman who lived in Lion’s Paw whom River had taught the language of the beasts as a way to turn Akira away from the aggressive need for vengeance she felt after being bullied by two ruthless classmates, River thought that the behemoth that had just crawled out of her belly would already, in its newborn form, be a fitting combatant alongside Godzilla, Gamera, or even Mothra. All of whom were the beloved kaiju River and Akira watched fight each other and various other monstrosities on the many rain-soaked days the two spent together over the past two years.
Briefly, River laughed, something she had long ago learned was one of the most effective weapons in any situation life handed you, and then stopped with a bolt of fear. In her mind, she saw Pax causing the epic-scale destruction of one of the beloved monsters she had just imagined. She then recalled how close the humans were to the daisy-filled woods, which now surrounded River. The wise Paleolithic man’s words rushed back over her ears, and River again recalled how he had told her to wait for the child to return to her.
River sat down and stood up again almost at once, fighting her instinct to protect the unaware humans in their habitats and trying to respect the part of her that told her to have faith in the wise man.
This internal war quickly ended when River’s two previous iterations, the Paleolithic sound that was like a sigh of relief, whom River then decided to call Alpha, and Ivy, came riding towards her on an elephant and a giant, ever-squealing pig, respectively.
“We have just checked the mortal-filled perimeter,” Alpha uttered in a series of rhapsodic knocks as she raised her hands and a murder of crows flew together, fell onto her back in a neat line, picked her up, and sat her on the ground. “All are well. Pax has not disturbed them.”
“We have also made sure the portal to our respective time zones, which is found in a barn several meters from here, is closed off so that the wonderful creature you call ‘Pax’ may not enter beyond or before 2025,” Ivy said in Latin, the language of her time and social standing.
“Bet,” River bellowed in the simple-minded slang of her own eon.
“What’s poppin’ though,” Alpha uttered in her own language.
All three iterations of River wildly laughed.
Once again, as was often the case in the 21st century, this minor moment of levity turned swiftly to terror as screams erupted from the human habitats to the left side of where River and her two iterations now stood reunited together in a circle.
“We have to have faith in the wise man’s words,” Alpha stammered as she put an arm up to River and Ivy to stop them from whatever hasty decision they were about to make.
“We see what faith has done to the greatest minds of our respective eras,” Ivy said and instinctively reached for the sword that was strapped to the belt, which ran alongside her metal surcoat. “It is an infection. It is a lie, like so much of what man and mankind alike praise.”
It is then that Ivy saw River and Alpha were both going for their own swords.
With a look, River summoned them to stop.
“Faith is especially difficult when we know that the greatest lie is that there is a god above,” River said with her voice echoing throughout the woods and over the ears of all the gathered beasts, a collection of entities ranging from elephants to alligators and crocodiles to monkeys. “Faith is especially difficult when we know that the idea of ‘god’, as he is known, defies the goddess within all of us. This is just as difficult when we are all aware that Pax has no father. This is so because none of us in any of our various time frames has ever known the act of physical love.”
“But we are not here to defame mankind,” Ivy heralded with a kinetic power surging throughout her branching vocal cords. “We are here to save it and all of the fellow creatures that are a communal part of nature.”
That is when River caught Alpha and Ivy going again for their swords.
River returned the same look that Alpha had given them moments ago.
“These swords are gifts for your firstborn,” Alpha said with her muscular right fist clamped on her own blade.
“Put them in the dirt below our feet,” River said as she whistled, a summons to a nearby horse to stay away from the swords they had just placed in the ground. “If the wise man is correct and Pax hasn’t chosen violence, these swords will be his gift because we know he will never stain them with blood or raise them in violence. What we must do now is not follow Pax’s scent, as the animals around us are apt to do, or track them with their animal telepathy, as they undoubtedly also want to do, but wait for his return.”
That is when a great wind swept through the area. The dust and destruction it caused made the various iterations of River cover their faces and cough. They immediately searched for a hiding spot, but before they could, they heard an ear-splitting hiss. River’s blood ran cold in anticipation of what slithering serpent spawn she suspected to be causing such a ruckus.
“Pax,” she thought eerily as her maternal instinct kicked up inside of her with steel fists.
Then, a brief sense of relief gripped River. It was followed, inevitably, by an even worse feeling of horror.
From where she stood, River saw a mammoth beast with the neck of a giraffe and the hulking wingspan of a pterodactyl growling like a dog. It was chomping its man-sized incisors at Pax, who was in its grasp.
Pax kept trying to wrap its giant snake-like body around the creature and bring it down to the ground in hopes of constricting the entity to death like an anaconda, to no avail.
“He’s fighting to save the community of Lion’s Paw,” River said to her other two iterations, who again had their hands on their still undrawn swords, in a tone that sounded like even she wasn’t sure that was what was happening.
That is when a three-hundred-foot bear-like monster smashed through a nearby house, its elderly owners shaking their fists at the massive brute and asking one another if their homeowner’s insurance would cover such a unique calamity, and attacked the dueling creatures.
Suddenly, a cacophony of roars, hisses, chirps, and squeaks, all war cries coming from the animal collective around River and her other iterations, rose up over Lion’s Paw.
The din became deafening in its volume. There was something about it that switched on the once believed to be mythic “lizard brain” in everyone in the surrounding area. Soon, the animals in and around River, Alpha, and Ivy were fighting each other.
As if they, too, were giving into the turn of the mental switch, River and her two iterations drew their weapons. Blades glinted and were connected in combat as the sky overhead turned blood red, then black.
Families ran from their homes. Panic rose as these individuals trampled over each other and pushed people out of the way.
This caused flashbacks to how mankind treated each other during and since the COVID-19 pandemic to explode in River’s mind.
She closed her eyes as pictures of power-hungry politicians from all eras, past and present, came to her as one shallow individual. In her mental reverie, River saw mankind making the same errors, always resorting to violence out of the fear they felt when they were combatted with something they didn’t understand, and knew that the scene before her was just further proof that mankind will never learn from the mistakes they have made throughout the generations.
That is when River gently put her sword in the ground, raised her open hands, and spoke a single word in the universal language of the beasts, “Peace.”
For a moment, everything fell silent.
“We are better than this,” Ivy said in the language of the beasts.
“We are better than this,” Alpha reiterated.
Then, the animals themselves roared, hissed, chirped, and squeaked the same sentiments.
The kaiju-like creatures even joined in the conversation by repeating this statement in their own language of grunts and nasal sounds.
Soon, the fighting stopped, and all were gathered.
Pax accepted the swords in the ground and his place alongside his past and present mothers and all the other great unspoken kings and queens of the animal world.
Faith, like peace, had been restored.
But, as was the case with both faith and peace, River, all her iterations, and the collective of animals knew as they were thanked, embraced, and began their own journey back to their own eras, that such things were, as had always been true, fleeting.
In due time, they would all meet again to reteach and reiterate the same lessons all creatures great and small should’ve learned long ago.
- River, Her Two Iterations, And The Animal Collective - September 26, 2026
- A Primal Scream of Rage - May 11, 2026
- Junior - January 17, 2026
