“Surprise!” Roxy cheered as she plopped onto the bed where her brother Allen was lying down on his back, half asleep in the breeze of the whirring ceiling fan above.

            She snapped her fingers and began rapidly whispering a few unearthly phrases under her breath.  Instantly, the ordinary teenage boy before her shrunk down to eight inches tall.  Allen barely had time to wake up to witness his visitor’s arrival in his bedroom and notice his newly reduced height.

            With a smirk, Roxy brought her bare right foot down to rest on top of her brother’s reclining form until she had managed to bury his entire body under her smooth sole, from the tip of her slender toes to the end of her soft heel.  Slowly, she began compressing down on him just hard enough to keep his arms and legs from rising off the bed.

            Gently, then, she laid her toes across his head, allowing him to gaze up between two of her long digits, up the length of her smooth shin, and past her knee to her adorable grinning face, adorned with her silky chocolate brown locks that reached just past the ends of her shoulders, a single bright purple highlight glistening amongst the rest of her hair.

            “Happy to see me?” she giggled, wriggling her toes joyfully.

            “Hey Roxy,” Allen grunted up at his gigantic sister, managing a smile despite his sudden lack of motion range, as well as the addition of weight along the length of his shrunken body.  “What are you doing here?”

            “Oh, you know,” she drawled, batting her long black eyelashes and rocking her foot back and forth across Allen’s body on the sleight weight of her heel and the ball of her foot.  “You can only handle so much college before you wanna blow your brains out from boredom, so I thought I’d come home for the weekend.  God, I missed you…”

            “Yeah, missed you... too,” Allen grunted earnestly, turning his head to the side as his older sister’s toes began playfully tapping themselves lightly against his face.  He wrapped his arms around two of Roxy’s toes, the nails painted a sharp black as they so often were, and hugged them together to keep them from writhing so aggressively.  As he did, his tiny fingers unintentionally ran through a few globs of toejam leftover from the black knee socks Roxy had pulled off only a few minutes before, but he shrugged this off.

            Roxy arched her sole over Allen’s legs, kneading the rounded ball of her foot into his chest just hard enough that he had to slow his breathing down to keep up.  It wasn’t anything he wasn’t used to.

            “How’s school?  Being big man on campus for a change, and all that?” Roxy wondered aloud down to Allen as she continued batting her toes gently at his cheeks.

            “It’s pretty nice.  Got all the classes I wanted for senior year,” he answered cheerfully, suddenly wrinkling his nose.  The potent wallop packed by the billowing stench of Roxy’s recently shoe-confined appendage was starting to take its sour toll on Allen’s nostrils, particularly with his face embraced by the underside of each of his sister’s lithe toes so affectionately.

            Obviously, she hadn’t bothered to let her feet air out before bounding up the stairs to place them on top of her soon-to-be shrunken sibling.  Roxy even seemed to notice Allen’s discomfort with the odor, but this only made her hug her toes more possessively against Allen’s head, who seemed too sheepish to do anything but take it quietly and cough under his breath.

            “You’re lucky, though,” the witch insisted, her eyes wandering around Allen’s room.  “You don’t know how easy you’ve got it with high school teachers.  They don’t expect much more than bullshit busywork from you.  But now, in college?  Like, wow.”

            “So I’ve heard,” Allen replied, finally having wrestled his sister’s probing toes into submission, though it was really only because she had let him.

            “I’m serious.  My GPA is gonna go down the tubes if I don’t figure out what it is these psychos want from me!”

            “Why don’t you just put a spell on them?” Allen teased.

            “Oh, you’re just hilarious, aren’t you?” Roxy answered, rolling her eyes and trying not to laugh, pressing her naked foot down just a little harder on Allen’s body for the briefest moment.  “You know, mom only made a thing out of that back in high school because you told her about it.”

            “You were cheating, though,” Allen said.

            “Was not!”

            “You said some magic words and got your teacher to give you an A-plus when you were barely passing the class.  I think that counts as chea- mmmpphh!” Allen insisted before having most of his face covered by Roxy’s big toe, which she quickly shifted over to stop him from finishing his statement.

            “Yeah, I know, maybe I overplayed it a little.  Maybe A-minus would’ve been more plausible,” she considered as Allen slapped at the side of the massive big toe bunched up against his nose and mouth, cutting off his airflow.  “It doesn’t matter since Mom put that restriction hex on me.  Now I can’t even make the professors levitate a few inches off the ground, let alone give me the grade I deserve.”

            “And by deserve, you mean want because you can’t study hard enough to deserve it?” Allen piped in, finally managing to slide his face out from underneath the controlled pressure of his sister’s toe.

            “Oh, shut up.  You’re just jealous because you can’t do any of that stuff yourself,” she snarked.

            “I don’t need that stuff.  Sometimes doing stuff the real way is best.  Plus, I know how to read,” Allen challenged playfully, wrapping his hands around Roxy’s toes again to keep them from moving.

            “Oh yeah?” Roxy chuckled, raising an eyebrow.  “You can read, huh?  Then read this.”  She snapped her fingers again, causing the words “BITE ME” in delicate blue letters to appear tattooed on the underside of her toe print, hovering above Allen’s face.

            “Well, I would read it, but the handwriting is kind of crap, so I can’t,” Allen deadpanned before finding the toe bearing down on his face again.

            “How did I know this was going to happen, all those years ago?” Roxy asked, rippling her toes over Allen’s chest and shoulders, wrestling with his tiny slapping hands.  “Literally, when you were two, and Mom and Dad were adopting you from that place, they were all “Be nice to him, Roxy.  He’s a human, and he can’t do the same things you can.  Meh, meh, meh!”  But I knew you were gonna be mean to me, either way.  I just knew it.”

            “Can I come out from under here now?” Allen asked when the barrage of toe taps on his body had ended, feeling the weight of his sister’s gargantuan sole splaying itself down across his body like an oversized mattress.

            “That depends.  Are you gonna play nice?”

            “That depends too.  Do you deserve me playing nice?” Allen retorted.

            “Apparently not yet.  Maybe I’ll just make you say uncle.”

            “I’m afraid that’s not going to happen,” he said daringly.  “I’m a little too used to your tricks now.”

            “Oh, yeah?  Then I guess we’ll get creative.  If you wanna come out, you gotta kiss my toe.”

            “Kiss it?  Please, there are children present.”

            “And not just a peck.  A big wet one.  Like a grandma kiss.”

            “Roxy, you’re a witch, and this is really the best thing you can come up with?”

            “Sometimes doing stuff the real way is best, Mr. Smarty Pants,” Roxy drawled, crossing her arms and keeping the pressure on Allen’s body constant.

            “I don’t think you’ve made me do this since I was like fourteen.”

            “C’mon, just do it, you’re starting to make it weird.”

            “Yeah, I’m the one making it weird,” Allen smarmed as he rolled his eyes.  With a sigh, he puckered up and planted a kiss on the underside of Roxy’s toe print with a dramatic enough smack that it was heard loud and clear by its recipient.  He could still taste the rubbery aura of Roxy’s favorite green Converse shoes on his lips, as well as the tainted salty aftertaste flavor from her tight black socks.  However embarrassing it was, there was something ironically nostalgic about it, probably having to do with some long-forgotten kids game.

            “Good enough, I guess,” Roxy groaned, finally lifting her foot off Allen’s body.  “For now…”

            “I don’t suppose that token also bought me a one-way ticket to being five-foot-eleven again?” Allen asked as he shifted himself onto his haunches.

            “Don’t you even start.  You’re five-foot-ten on your best day,” Roxy responded, leaning forward over her still-reclining doll-sized brother in defiance of his lie.

            “Hey, I’m just trying to think positive.  That’s how us humans have to do everything.  So can you make me five-foot-ten-and-a-half again?”

            Roxy shook her head, whipping her silky hair back and forth above Allen like a streamer display.  “Not so fast, buster.  I’m only home for the weekend,” she said, a sly smirk crossing her lips.  “We’re gonna have some good old-fashioned fun first.”