“Okay, I’m serious this time.  It’s going to work!” Roxy insisted angrily as her hands hovered over a circular metal tray on the kitchen counter.  “And then you’re gonna be real fricking annoyed that you had to pay for it yourself.”

            “Yeah, maybe, but at least I’ll be the one without food poisoning,” Allen said as he fumbled awkwardly with the leather folds of his wallet a few feet away, having been reduced back to eight inches as soon as their gaming session was ended, as promised.  “That pizza guy is gonna be here any second.  Are you going to make me big enough to answer the door, or what?  Because unless they just happen to be a witch, too, we may have a lawsuit or something on our hands.  Not to mention Mom and Dad throwing a fit.”

            “No.  If this… doesn’t work, again, I’ll answer the door and pay for the pizza myself,” Roxy snapped.

            Allen tried to hide his grin as he shoved his wallet closed again.  As competitive and demanding a personality as she was, Roxy was a hopeless gambler when she was too positive about being right.  Often, this carried with it pleasant benefits that saw Allen getting his way when his sister was forced to play out promises made in the heat of the moment.

            “Okay.  All yours, then, champ,” he said encouragingly.

            Roxy ignored his sarcasm and set to work.  The girl’s lips quivered, the words of the spell mumbled under her breath.  This gave Allen further cause to chuckle, though he kept it quiet enough not to distract her and risk blowing this chance for free food on his sister’s dime.

            The girl was a talented enough witch by this point in her life that most casual spells barely required a flick of her wrist or a batting of her eyes, yet this, a simple little conjure of a large pizza for their dinner, was giving her immense difficulty.

            It wasn’t that she was incapable of crafting something that looked like a pizza, though whether or not she could make one that didn’t taste like paint thinner and rat carcasses was an entirely different story.  Food conjures that were actually edible had been nearly impossible for the twenty-year-old since she first received a lesson on magic in her youth, and it had been a source of great humor in the entire extended family for a long time that a girl who could turn inanimate objects into animals or juggle boulders in midair couldn’t snap up a cupcake.

            Sure enough, in a small flash the empty pan was occupied by what looked like an admittedly lovely pizza with a well-browned crust and bubbling cheese on top.

            “Who’s the champ now?” Roxy asked snidely, tearing off a hunk of the pie and chomping on the corner.  For a moment, she chewed away, smiling as widely as possible, then finally gave in, hacking the masticated bite onto the countertop so that the disgustingly sauce-and-saliva slathered thing bounced toward the corner, stopping just a few inches in front of Allen.

            “Um… probably the pizza guy is?” Allen said helpfully, wrinkling his nose at the sight of the balled up monstrosity.

            “Why don’t you try it?  It’s really good.  I just didn’t want to steal it all for myself,” Roxy grumbled, not even bothering to try hiding her bitterness, as she crossed her arms in defeat.

            “So what was the flavor this time?  Skunk butt?” Allen asked, kicking the gunk ball away so that it rolled off the edge of the counter and plummeted into the trash can below.

            “I think I got a little hint of dish detergent in there?” Roxy opined thoughtfully.  She grabbed a glass from the countertop and filled it with water from a bat of her eyelashes before chugging it to wash out the aftertaste.

            At that moment, the doorbell rang, and the young witch roared out an impassioned groan, throwing her head back dramatically and slamming her hands in a partially fabricated rage onto the surface next to her sibling.

            “Thanks for dinner, sis,” Allen said, giving her thumb a reassuring pat.

            Too irritated to acknowledge the act, Roxy wordlessly swept off into the front hallway and begrudgingly honored her bet.  She seemed to be rushing through the transaction as rapidly as possible to limit the humiliation.  Less than a minute later she returned and whomped the steaming box onto the countertop.

            “Wow, I don’t believe it, it… it smells like something you could eat without getting a stomach virus!” Allen gasped elatedly.  The teen pulled up the cardboard flaps and whipped it open to let the delicious aroma waft out into the kitchen and help replace the lingering stench of his sister’s horrid concoction.

            “So are we watching a movie, or what?” the witch snapped, obviously hopeful to move on from the topic of cooking before she became too embarrassed.  Her finger twirled around the purple-dyed locks of her hair, and the bangles on her wrist seemed to jostle a little harder than normal.  Seeing her beaten was a rare sight for her human sibling, and it filled him with guilty amusement.

            “Yeah, I guess, sure,” Allen agreed, crouching down to swipe up a bite of the cheese from the pizza.  His eyes shifted into the center of the pie and onto the small white tripod used to keep the box from collapsing on it.  “I guess we’ve already got a table right here, huh?”

            As soon as the words had escaped Allen’s lips he wanted to slug himself.  That foreboding snap of Roxy’s fingers had sounded in his ear drums and moments later the seventeen-year-old had dwindled down until the low-hanging lip of the pizza box was at eye level.

            Looking around at the suddenly gargantuan cavern of a kitchen, he supposed he wasn’t much more than a single inch in height.

            “Couldn’t have said it better,” an irritatingly smug voice resounded somewhere above.  Allen gazed upward just in time to witness a cluster of slender curled fingers advancing on him from on high.  Sighing, he didn’t even bother attempting to duck out of the way as Roxy’s thumb gingerly squeezed into his torso, pinning him comfortably against her index and middle fingers before plucking him up into the air.

            Soaring upward for just a moment, Allen hung in the vice of soft flesh before his sister’s laughing green eyes, and didn’t even need to see her mouth to know a pompous grin was spread over her lips.

            This act might’ve once caused his stomach to turn inside out with the weightless feeling pulling at his dangling feet, not to mention the dizzying drop if her fingers should part, but she’d been doing this to him ever since he was twelve years old, before she was exactly precise with her adjustments to his height, and the sensation was starting to feel bizarrely familiar.  He wasn’t going anywhere.

            “Haven’t you ever heard of the concept of, like… jokes?” Allen wheezed with annoyance at his helpless height, squirming a little between the firm yet gentle grip of his sister’s digits.

            “I told you to not give me any ideas,” Roxy tsked, waggling a finger at him and shrugging.  She lowered him into the open palm of her other hand, cupping it to ensure he couldn’t try to crawl out.  “Don’t beat yourself up.  I was already starting to think the same thing, anyway.  I was just gonna wait until we were sitting down to do it.”

            “How am I even supposed to pick up a slice now?” Allen moaned.  “What, am I just supposed to tear chunks off?”

            “Shut up.  Mom and Dad’s crummy TV will look like a movie theatre one now,” Roxy ordered curtly.  “You’re welcome.”

            The rest of the evening was, even Allen had to admit despite the looming specter of homework and college applications, a much better use of his time than he’d been planning before Roxy showed up earlier.

            Sure enough, thanks to his corny joke, the tiny plastic pizza saver was pulled from the mess of cheese and deposited onto a napkin for him to use as a table.  The edges were still greasy, but Roxy had flatly refused to pull a piece out for him until he spent at least sixty seconds pretending to wait for a server in a pizza parlor.

            “You ordered the greasy ball of cheese and marinara, I believe?” Roxy intoned with falsified etiquette, swirling her finger in midair so that a large hunk from the center of a slice floated out of the box and over to Allen’s makeshift table.

            “Actually, I ordered a normal slice for a normal-size person, but whatever you have, I guess,” Allen sighed.

            “So glad to see my customers happy,” the girl said in the same voice, smirking broadly and plopping the ball of food onto the table before scooping up an average-proportioned triangle for herself.  “Eat up, and be sure to tip me well, or I might spit in your drink.”

            Once he’d gotten to scarfing down the bite of pizza, Allen did have to realize the benefit of his needing so little food at this size.  There’d be plenty of leftovers in the morning now, and God knew Roxy wouldn’t have plans to fix him any alternative breakfast.

            The movie selection process had gone as Allen suspected: Roxy picked one first, some goofy sci-fi comedy she’d seen a million times and came very close to making Allen’s ears bleed with its puns, and then he got to pick one, though of course not from the list he’d have preferred, as his sister would literally give up her powers willingly for the rest of her life before sitting through a documentary about the War of 1812.

            “You know there were way more interesting wars going on in that same year, right?” Roxy had scoffed as she held her inch-tall sibling close enough to the movie shelf that he could pick one out.  “Like, the one where the elves in the UK were having this big-long thing with a dwarf clan from Greenland and then it ended because the elf heir secretly got married to the dwarf princess.”

            “I think dad showed me a picture from a book of that couple once.  But I thought it was an elf princess and a dwarf prince?”

            “Nope, elf prince and dwarf princess,” Roxy corrected.  “The prince just had really great cheekbones and the princess probably could’ve beaten up a manticore with her bare hands.”

            “Wow.”

            “Right?  That’s what they should’ve call the War of 1812 instead!” the witch chuckled.  “It’s so… presumptuous.”

            “Hey, don’t try to discredit humanity.  That was a pretty important point in history for us.”

            “Dragons,” Roxy insisted loudly, breathing heavily enough with the effort that her warm breath fogged against Allen’s face.  “The elf-dwarf one had dragons.”

            “All right, all right, fine, so maybe that one should’ve gotten the name,” Allen relented.  “So if you’re not looking to expand your mind with human history, how about the thing that won Best Picture last year?  You know, the one in sepia that only has five lines of dialogue?”

            “I’ve got news for you, nerd.  Here are the options.”  Pinching him back between her thumb and ring finger, then, Roxy hoisted Allen up to a higher shelf and set him on the wooden surface.  Of course, she’d placed him on a level that only contained sci-fi and fantasy films.  Beaten, Allen rapped his fist against a random one he’d never even heard of.

            “Perfect choice,” Roxy said.  “See, picking stuff isn’t so hard when you don’t pick terrible things.”

            Roughly an hour into the second movie, Allen was seriously regretting not doing his research, because as it turned out, the plot revolved partially around a hapless human character who was hit with an alien beam and reduced to a few inches in height.

            “Hey, I didn’t know you were in movies!” Roxy would snark practically every time the character would appear onscreen, nudging her brother in the shins with her pinky finger as he rested on the shredded threads of her jeans.

            The end of that one couldn’t come soon enough for the inch-tall audience member, and the evening had hardly begun.

            Four movies in and Allen was beginning to nod off on his sister’s knee, though he was jolted back to wakefulness every time something loud would happen on the screen or Roxy would laugh maniacally at a joke, shaking her entire body.

            “I don’t suppose you’re gonna let me go to sleep now?” Allen groaned.

            “Huh?  Yeah, sure.  I’ve had a loooong day,” Roxy drawled.  She blinked, shutting the TV off, then scooped her fingers down to her knee and let her brother slide into the center of her palm.

            “Did you even go to a single class at the university today?” he demanded with a snort, pulling himself onto his haunches on the tender terrain.

            “As a matter of fact, I did!” she retorted as she leaned back on the couch cushions.  She tipped her fingers against her other hand, allowing Allen to roll awkwardly from one to the other.  “Just… skipped a couple of the boring ones.”

            “Ever the scholar,” her sibling mumbled with a knowing smile as he was transferred back to her other hand with a soft plop.  “By the way, is there a point to whatever you’re doing to me right now?”

            “No, not really,” she sighed, doing it once more and catching him this time on the very tips of her fingers before letting him tumble down them like a carnival slide, where he was stopped against the plush heel of her hand.  A long yawn lumbered from her lips.  “All right, ready to tuck in?”

            “Can you put me up to normal again?”

            “No,” she informed him, and slowly her fingers began to fold downwards, forming a ceiling of flesh above him in the warm center of her hand.

            “Eight, even?”

            “What, and risk you escaping in the morning to do fun stuff without me?”

            “I guarantee you I’m not doing fun stuff by myself in the morning.”

            “I know you’re not, because you’re still gonna be where you are right now.”

            “C’mon, seriously?  What if you… you know, drop me, or…”

            Roxy batted her eyelashes, and Allen felt an involuntary stiffening of his sister’s muscles under the soft skin as she hexed her appendage into a temporary state of painless atrophy.

            “There.  Now you’re not going anywhere,” she said, satisfied as she yanked a quilt up onto the couch from its folded position across the footrest.

            Allen squeezed his way up between the thumb and index finger of his sister’s cocooned hand, and opened his mouth to make one last protest, but was greeted to the sound of Roxy already snoring, her head tipped back against a pillow.

            Shrugging, then, the miniscule human wormed his way back inside the admittedly comforting environment of Roxy’s toasty fist and cuddled himself against her palm, drifting off after a few more minutes.