“So then she just goes and calls Cathy a bitch while she’s still walking out of the room, like she can’t hear it!” Roxy exclaimed incredulously, gesturing wildly with her milk-dribbling cereal spoon as she balanced on the back of the couch.  Shaking her head, she dipped the utensil back into the sugary sludge in her bowl.  “Unbelievable.”

            “Did you say anything?” Allen asked, trying not to laugh.

            “You mean to her face?” the witch snorted.

            “Yeah,” he answered, knowing such a thing would not at all be out of character for his sister.

            “I was about five seconds away from it, but then I just…” she sighed, then quickly pressed her lips together, silencing herself.  “…you know, let it go.”

            Lifting a disbelieving eyebrow and crossing his arms as he bobbed idly in the milk of Roxy’s cereal, still at just an inch tall, Allen stared up at the twenty-year-old’s straight face to see through the hysterically obvious lie.

            The day his sister actually learned to let something go would be an early sign of the end times.

            “Don’t give me that look,” Roxy smarmed.  Pinching her fingers daintily around the metal spoon, she stirred the milk, causing a small white whirlpool to sweep Allen around the rim of the bowl.  In response, he threw his arms up as though on a roller coaster and let his body sway in circles.  As he passed a chunk of marshmallow, he snatched it up and chewed on it while the towering young woman continued swirling him around the contents of her breakfast.

            “Not judging.  I’m just saying, you’re the same person who turned some girl’s cheese sandwich into grasshoppers when you were nine,” Allen commented, shrugging as the milky rapid ride came to a slow end.  He wrapped his arms around a puffy cereal chunk, using it to help stay afloat so he could concentrate on giving Roxy his most condescending smile.

            “And don’t turn that around on me!” the girl snapped playfully.  She pulled the spoon from the bowl in a massive spritz of liquid that blotted out her brother’s vision for a moment and pointed the object accusingly at him, as though considering jabbing his fragile inch-tall frame with it.  “I only did that because she took a pair of craft scissors and snipped a huge layer off the back of Margo’s hair when she wasn’t looking!  You don’t just do that to a girl and get away with it.”

            “So I’ve noticed,” Allen chuckled.  “Like I said, not judging.”

            “Whatever,” Roxy said with a roll of her eyes.  “So maybe I didn’t let it go right away.  But I did later.  Right after I-”

            “Turned her into a grasshopper?”

            “No,” Roxy growled, then averted her eyes and smirked, tilting the cereal bowl from side-to-side like a tilt-a-whirl.  “It crossed my mind, obviously, but then I had to think about whether or not I’d be cool with mom and dad putting a bind on me for the rest of the year, especially for doing that to someone who can’t fight back.”

            “Yeah.  They really do hate it when you put people without magic in compromising positions, don’t they?” Allen groaned with emphasis as he was rocked from one edge of the rim to the other, splashing through numerous clusters of marshmallows and sugared corn puffs along the way.

            “For the fifty-millionth time, you don’t ever get to count yourself when I’m making these examples,” Roxy said, narrowing her eyes.  She drove her spoon forward again, stirring her brother and nudging him back into the furthest curve of the bowl with her utensil.  “I swear, you just never learn, do you?  Even with all your fancy Dean’s List posters mom and dad hung up in the other room like you’re hot shit.”

            “I really don’t see how I’m not relevant in this situation,” he protested, tumbling backward over the rounded metal bubble of the giant spoon.  “Seeing as you kind of just stuck me in here without a warning or anything.”

            “Hey, it was gonna take way too long to let you make your own breakfast.  Did you even think through that part?” Roxy retorted, raising an eyebrow.  “Just picture it.  You, trying to drag a cereal box around big enough to be a house for you.  Then trying to pour the milk with your itty bitty hands.  It would’ve been a joke.”

            “And I guess it was out of the question for you to grow me big enough to just make it myself?”

            “Obviously.”

            “Right,” Allen sighed pleasantly, shaking his head as Roxy’s spoon came back around once more to propel him through the pond of breakfast sludge as playful penance for his egregiousness.  The ride was a little wilder this time, as the witch scooped under her brother just low enough that she could move the inch-tall human about the liquid course with more speed and precision.  As a result, several thickened swallows of milk made their way down Allen’s throat as he was tossed beneath the off-white surface several times by the force of his sister’s tilting hands, though he managed to cough them back up.  Righting himself after doing an undermilk backflip, he coughed them back up.

            Roxy noticed this unsanitary act and instantly created a few more lashing ripples through her bowl, shaking it around and knocking Allen right back under the surface with a surprised sputter.  “Hey.  Remember the breakfast rule?  If it goes in your mouth, you have to swallow it.  I don’t want your sick-o germs.  You didn’t even brush your teeth last night or this morning!”

            “Yeah, maybe because I’m the size of the toothpaste cap now?” Allen suggested.  Several soggy crumbs had lodged themselves in his hair, and with a shrug, he set about picking them out.

            “Technicalities,” Roxy scoffed.  Her spoon descended a final time, clacking against the basin of the milky reservoir, and then rose again, directly under Allen such that he felt several marshmallow chunks as well as himself ascending from the bowl as his sister selected what was apparently her next bite.

            There was a moment of peculiar silence between them, as though they were daring one another to burst out laughing first, and both were determined to win.  The spoon rose higher and higher as the witch’s powerful fingers, steady as ever, drew the end of it closer to her milk-stained lips.  Allen crossed his legs in the center of his sibling’s humongous circular cutlery, folding his hands in his lap as though about to settle into a yoga pose.  Roxy, meanwhile, kept an expression of cool placidity plastered on her face.

            Strict, unblinking eye contact was rigidly maintained as the witch’s lips parted, her tongue lowering itself into the base of her mouth to make room.  A low hum emanated from the back of her throat, as though she was having her tongue depressed at a doctor’s appointment, and the call beckoned Allen inside.  The metal slid quietly against the bottom row of her teeth as Roxy passed the bite of food, as well as her brother, into the steamy hovel.  Neither had flinched, and “uncle” remained unsaid by either of the competitive pair.

            There was a pause as Roxy held her jaws wide open, the spoon still resting on her tongue and separating her writhing taste buds from the still-serene Allen, who stared at his sister’s wide gullet and her dancing uvula as it glistened from the kitchen lights behind him.  Two small droplets of frothy saliva plopped from the red roof of her mouth, landing on the teen’s shoulders, but still he didn’t move.  He watched the wet metal fog rhythmically in the heat.

            And then a shift.  The young witch’s fingers curled, tilting the spoon downward so that Allen and the milky contents were tipped out of the curve of the utensil and, finally, deposited with a squishy splash onto the sticky surface of her tongue.

            As the white droplets snaked their way between the taste buds, the rippled muscle seemed to come alive again from the sweet flavors, and fresh spit began to leak down the curve of the undulating cheeks.  The gummy liquid filled in under the tongue until the inch-tall visitor to his sister’s mouth found himself wading in her warm, bubbly saliva, his hands becoming coated in it no matter where he tried to lay them.  Light seemed to disappear slowly from the moist air.

            At last, Allen broke the silence.

            “Well,” he yelled out loud enough for Roxy to hear, shrugging to himself.  “I definitely hope the breakfast rule isn’t the same for you as it is for me.”

            A snort of uncontrollable laughter overtook them both, churning the milk and cereal bits into a frenzy and tossing the human occupant against the buoyant surface of Roxy’s cheek, nearly knocking his ankles against her molars.  Seconds later Allen felt gravity taking hold of him as the tongue slurped him back into its control.  It spilled him off the tip of the pink organ and back between the wet lips as his titanic sister literally spit him out like a spoiled grape.

            As though he’d done a cannonball off a diving board, Allen plunged back into the cereal bowl, right where he’d been aimed, and thrashed about in the milk for a few moments to regain his bearings.  Before he could even resurface, though, he felt his legs being pinched gently between Roxy’s thumb and forefinger, and suddenly he was rocketing back out of the liquid, spraying drops every which way.

            “All right, all right, I’m willing to give that round to you,” Roxy sighed as she dangled her tiny, sopping brother upside down in midair before lowering him into her palm, allowing him to right himself at last.  She didn’t bother to hide an amused grin.  “I figured you’d crack before I even took the spoon out.”

            “Really?” Allen chuckled, squeezing the milk out of his hair as effectively as possible and peeling his soaked shirt off his stomach, unwilling to consider how much of the sopping substance was milk and how much was his sister’s saliva.  Judging by how much heavier it had become after his trip into her mouth, he suspected the latter was in high quantity.

            “Yeah, really, nerd,” she laughed.

            “I thought I had at least a fifty-fifty shot of you actually just swallowing after I said that,” he admitted sheepishly, clearly worried about his explanation leading to an enactment.

            “Nah, you don’t have to worry about being eaten this weekend,” Roxy giggled, purposefully letting her purple locks fall over one of her eyes to establish ominousness in her whispered words.  “I’m watching my diet.  No more junk food.”

            Another moment of pseudo-morbidity was established as the pair stared each other down, Allen sitting motionless in his sister’s hand, but this silence lasted a far shorter time than the previous one as each nearly doubled over with side-splitting cackles.