Audiotape-
It wasn't long before Coraline decided the garden needed a treehouse, and not much later after that she managed to bully her mom into bullying her dad into taking her and Wybie to the hardware store to buy supplies. Wooden beams, nails and hammers, cool yellow hard hats with reflective tape on the sides, measuring tape and a handsaw. On the way back from the store, in the backseat of the car, plans were drawn up with white gel pens on blue construction paper, because that was how the professionals did it (sort of). Plans with turrets and towers and huge stained glass windows and stairs that went nowhere and places through which to pour tar on invaders. Plans with three stories with two bedrooms, a bathroom, a kitchen, and at the top, a grand observatory with a supercomputer to record their conversations with aliens. They were debating whether to put a moat or a motorcycle ramp at the base.
When they got home Coraline and Wybie dragged all the supplies to the center of the garden and went prowling for a good, sturdy, tree-house looking tree. They found a good one by dinnertime, and pulled the building materials over to its base. Satisfied, they gave in to the calls of their guardians and went home. The next day Coraline showed up in her overalls and Wybie had swapped out his skull mask for a plastic hardhat, and they got started. They leaned two ladders against the trunk and Coraline's father helped them bring up the supplies. They formed a lopsided sort of tic-tac-toe grid out of wood, with the tree's trunk in the middle and secured with forty-five nails for stability and because hammering was fun. After the support was established they practiced their high beam walking, called out to exotic birds, pointed to where the telescope was meant to go, and ate sandwiches from their lunchboxes, even though it was summer and Wybie hated sandwiches, to be more like the construction workers on cartoons. After lunch they pulled up the lighter boards and cut out a floor, sawing off the edges that stuck out in lopsided hacking strokes. They finally had a floor. They christened it with drawings of stars and dragonflies and hands made out of needles, with skulls and mechanical gears, using a half lost box of waxy crayons. Then, exhausted, they climbed back to the ground.
They never did get past the floor.
The day after the floor was finished it rained, and there were just too many worms to save and puddles to muss up to bother building. And the day after that they felt more like fishing than putting up walls. And the next thing they knew summer was nearly done, and even though they still played in the 'treehouse', it didn't have walls or an observatory or a bathroom or even a rope ladder. The bucket of nails left at the trunk of the tree had rusted and become a breeding ground for mosquitoes. The extra wood had rotted, and tinged the air around it with the exotic and pungent smell of damp wood. Half of it had been stolen away for makeshift seesaws and battering rams. The floor had fared a bit better, and could still support the wrestling and storytelling and adventures and bird watching required by childhood in the summer. The entire thing was suspiciously devoid of supercomputers and motorbike ramps. But the air was crisp with the promise of autumn, and barbeque smoke made them feel outdoorsy, and the sky was a million pinpoints of light on a dark, inky canvas. So they wheedled Mr. Bobo's telescope from him, and Wybie lugged it up the veteran ladder while Coraline stole her mother's tape recorder. They spent the night searching for Venus and tracing the Milky Way, recording snippets of jokes they were sure they'd remember forever on the audiotape. They laughed and spied on Martians until eleven, when they finally succumbed to the darkness and their fleece blankets and fell asleep, arms akimbo and thoughts buzzing, until early morning burned their eyelids open.
The audiotape was lost for five years.
It surfaced when Coraline's mother got sick of the dragon's den that was Coraline's closet. Coraline, equally sick of explaining why she didn't like empty spaces behind doors so close to her bed, decided to shift through the mess, if only for show. She ended up finding five dollars and thirty six cents, three unmatched socks, a whirring yo-yo, a stale pretzel, and the cassette. She put the tape on her bedside table and told herself to find a cassette player. She ended up uncovering one from Wybie's garage. It was oil stained and the batteries were rotten, but with a new power source it worked. She listened to the first few seconds, mostly static and muffled laughter, before her mother called her to dinner. She forgot about it until the next week, when she awoke in a cold and terrified sweat sometime around three in the morning. She clutched the air around her blindly, and her hand knocked into her bedside table. She gripped it like a liferaft, slowly groping its surface as if for a tether to reality. She felt the cassette player and pushed it to her ear, unsure what she wanted from it, and pressed play.
Rustling. Laughter.
Wybie's voice.
"Hey Jonesy?"
"Yup?"
"…if the Aliens make contact, what should we tell them?"
"Probably that they should come over, as long as they don't evaporate us."
"And they should probably bring Tylenol so they don't all get sick and die."
Laughter.
"…Jonesy?"
"Yeah Wybourn?"
"… Our treehouse is pretty cool, right?"
"You mean our tree-floor?"
"I think it's better without a ceiling. You can see the stars."
"Yeah. It… makes me feel safe."
Rustling.
Coraline smiled, turning on her side and closing her eyes.