Neighbors. Everyone has them. Sometimes they get along with them, sometimes they don't. My wife and I are fairly lucky. We live in a suburban neighborhood full of tract houses. Front and back, our house

contacts four others; our two next-door neighbors and two that adjoin our backyard. We've never had any major problems with any of them but our relationships with each vary. On the right rear we don't know the people. On the right, next door, we're cordial with them, never socializing or anything else. On the left, next door, they are very good friends of ours. We socialize with them frequently and they are among our closest acquaintances. And then there are the left rear people.

They're different without a doubt and neither my wife nor myself cares too much for them. Their names are Maggie and Jonathan. Jonathan sells real estate for a living. Maggie is mostly a housewife but she works part time as a receptionist at some insurance company. They have a son named Joseph who is the same age as my oldest daughter; seven. Maggie and Joseph are born-again Christians with all of the zeal that goes along with that particular breed.

Now I have no problem with religion. I don't believe in organized religion myself; I think it's so obviously a form of mass behavioral control that it sometimes surprises me that so many people fall for it, but I've always been a firm believer in live and let live. I have my own views on God and morality and for the most part I like to think I'm a good person. I rarely lie, I don't steal or kill, and I do my best to think of others than myself in my actions. I'm proud of the fact that I do this voluntarily, without the threat of eternal damnation if I don't. I don't know or profess to know what happens after we die, figuring I'll find out eventually anyway. Maggie and Jonathan have both professed to me that if I don't believe in Jesus Christ as the Savior that I will burn in hell after death for this.

"Even though I'm a nice, moral person?" I ask them on the many occasions that they'd discussed this with me. "Even though I live my life pretty much according to the Bible's standards of saintly behavior? Even with all of that, I'll be cast into hell simply because I don't believe in J.C.?"

"Exactly." They would reply, and then usually admonish me for referring to The Lord as 'J.C.".

"I simply cannot accept that as the workings of a so-called kind and rational God." I would tell them. "It's completely without logic. By your own argument, Hitler, if he believed in Christ, is up there in Paradise right now while all of those six million Jews he killed, no matter how moral they were, are burning in hell."

"That's correct." They would say, pleased that they'd made their point so nicely, completely unaware of the madness of what they were saying.

That's the problem with devout believers in the bible. You simply can't argue with them. It's frustrating beyond belief trying to argue a point with someone who does not find it necessary to incorporate logic and common sense into their arguments. Religion is one of those subjects I do not like to debate. You will never change anyone's mind about it. There are others of course. Gun control, abortion, republican vs. democrat. I stay away from those subjects whenever possible but when someone like Maggie or Jonathan insists upon bringing them up, I have my ammunition always ready (and interestingly enough, Maggie and Joseph disagree with me on ALL of the previous examples).

Now their born-again zeal is annoying but that is not the main reason that I don't care too much for them. The main reason is their hypocrisy. I respect people who believe in what they preach and practice it. One of my co-workers is a Roman Catholic. Though that seems to me to be one of the more bizarre manifestations of religion, he follows it to the letter. He is moral to the point of sainthood. He follows every directive that the Pope hands down. He does not practice any form of birth control and as a result has fathered six children to this point. He does not believe in public schools so his wife home-schools all of his children. I've met these children and they are intelligent, thoughtful kids that any parent would be proud to have. He lives his life according to the rules set down in the bible and he is one of the nicest, most honest, decent people I've ever met in my entire life. He does not impose his views upon others unless he is asked to and he does not come across as if he and his family are better than others because of their beliefs.

Maggie and Jonathan however, are not like this. They preach to you one minute, telling you you're a sinner, inviting you to bible studies, and try to stab you in the back the next. Jonathan has more than once tried to get me involved in shady real estate deals. Maggie has tried to bully my wife into hosting one of those pampered chef parties, one of those deals where the distributor, Maggie, is the one to make all of the money while the host does all of the work and has her house get trashed. Both of them have lied and smooth-talked while trying to convince us to join in these ventures. Maggie has tried to sell us household items like curtains, throw rugs, or furniture for outrageously inflated prices. When we've been strapped for a babysitter on occasion and forced to call on Maggie, she actually charged us for watching our two girls, despite the fact that we've watched her kid multiple times for longer periods for free.

The best example of their legacy is their child, Joseph. He goes to school with my two daughters and often talks to them through the fence when they're playing outside. Sometimes he comes over to our house to play (often these are actually babysitting episodes, his mother will sometimes ask if he can come over to play and then take off to run some errands). He is the most spoiled brat I've ever encountered in my life. My children are well behaved if I do say so myself. My wife and I are strict but fair with them. If we tell our kids not to do something, they damn sure don't do it. Joseph however, will listen to you explain the rules and then break them two minutes later when your back is turned. He is a manipulator, talking my kids constantly into doing things they shouldn't be doing ('your daddy won't mind if you turn on the hose and squirt you mommy's flowers'). Maggie and Jonathan do not discipline him at all. They'll threaten him with punishment for doing something anti-social but they never follow through with what they threaten. Joseph, I imagine, picked up on this long ago.

Carla and I long ago decided to keep our contact with this family to a minimum. For the most part we're successful. But then came the attack of the dreaded stomach flu.

When you have kids that go to public school they pick up all kinds of weird viruses and bring them home with them. The stomach flu is perhaps the worst of this variety. As fate would have it, it was during my shift of childcare that it struck my two girls with a vengeance.

My wife is a nine to fiver, Monday through Friday as an accountant at the local television station. I am not a nine to fiver. I work at the same television station in the news department (at work is where we'd initially met each other). I am nothing so glamorous as a reporter or an anchorman. I'm a computer technician and an expert on graphics. When you watch the news and see all of those weather satellite pictures, captions beneath newsclips, maps, or cute little graphic pictures in the background, you have someone like me to thank for them. I work the weekend swing shift. My hours are Thursday through Monday from 4:00 PM to 11:30, the hours that encompass the afternoon and nightly news broadcasts.

On most of my days off I watch my two girls, getting them up in the morning, feeding them their breakfasts and sending them off to school. When they get home I feed them a snack and prepare dinner for the family. On that particular Tuesday morning my wife got ready for work while I fried up eggs for the girls, Megan and Ashley. They seemed a little slow that morning, a little lethargic, picking at their food instead of wolfing it like they usually did.

"Daddy." Ashley, the younger child who was in kindergarten told me. "My tummy doesn't feel good."

"Mine either." Megan agreed.

Just as Carla, dressed in a smart business outfit was preparing to kiss them goodbye, Megan hiccuped and then vomited an incredible amount of stomach contents all over her shirt and pants. Her face turned instantly green as she struggled to rush to the bathroom and the toilet. She spewed vomit out of her as she went.

As if on cue, Ashley, who was still sitting at the table, did the same, blemishing her own favorite dress. She headed for the other bathroom, leaving a similar trail behind her.

I closed my eyes in resignation as Carla fought to suppress a chuckle of amusement. "I don't envy you today." She told me, grabbing her purse and car keys and heading for the door after giving me a quick kiss. I gave her a vaguely obscene curse as she left.

I'd been through this before and though it is not pleasant, it's simply one of those things you have to put up with as a parent. The kids knew WHERE they were supposed to vomit but the problem was that they had a hard time reading the warning signs that their bodies gave. The result was soiled clothes and carpets. So far the sickness had been routine. I wouldn't realize that a major problem was developing in my household until later that day. I comforted the kids and called them in sick from school. I changed their clothes and threw the soiled ones in the laundry pile, which was already quite high from yesterday's clothes. They promptly barfed on their fresh clothes, adding them to the laundry pile. They had diarrhea as well, soiling several pairs of underwear. They threw up on their favorite stuffed animals, causing them to be added to the laundry pile. They went to bed to lie down and they vomited and/or defecated on their linen, not just the bottom sheet mind you, they managed to stain every piece of bedding in one way or another. I replaced the linen and had the same thing happen again.

Again, this was all routine unpleasantness until I decided to start washing some of the huge pile of laundry. The first load went through the wash cycle without any problem and I transferred it to the dryer. It was when I went to pull this load out of the dryer an hour later that I realized that fate was shitting on me. The laundry was still soaking wet and cold. Some experimentation finally showed me that the heating element in the dryer had picked this particular, inconvenient time to go out on me. There was no way to dry the clothes.

A call to my friendly appliance repairman revealed that I could not get the thing fixed for two days. In the meantime I had at least four loads of laundry to do, some of which was vital to the progression of the household. I considered stringing a clothesline out in the backyard but a quick glance at the weather told me that this was impossible. A typical Seattle early spring day was in progress. Grey clouds filled the sky and misty moisture, not quite heavy enough to qualify as rain was drifting down from them. Clothes hung outside would do nothing but get wetter.

I needed to borrow someone's dryer in a bad way. I called our next door neighbors, Tim and Lisa, but only got an answering machine. I called our across-the-street neighbors, another couple we were friendly with and got another answering machine. I called Carla's mother who lived a few miles away, receiving nothing but perpetual rings. Finally, out of desperation, I called Maggie, who I was reasonably certain would be home, though I figured she would want to charge me for the use of her dryer.

She picked up the phone on the second ring and greeted me politely. I explained my problem to her and, to my delight, she offered to come over and take my wet laundry for no charge whatsoever. She showed up at the door a few minutes later.

I had heard from Tim and Lisa that Maggie was pregnant but it was surprising to see her anyway. Maggie is an attractive woman with a well-proportioned body and large, firm breasts. She has dark blonde hair, always styled smartly, and is fond of short skirts that show off her attractive legs. She was wearing one of these skirts despite the weather and her stomach bulged out considerably with her mid-term pregnancy. Her breasts had also grown considerably too. I remembered hearing from Lisa once that Maggie had been "a little wild" before she'd found salvation with Jonathan and The Lord. Looking at her pretty legs I wondered just how wild she'd been.

I thanked her gratefully as I showed her into the house. She wobbled her stomach behind me, looking at the pile of soiled laundry that sat before the washing machine.

"You're sure you don't mind doing this for me?" I asked her as I handed over a basket full of wet darks.

"Not at all." She smiled. "Is it the stomach flu? I heard that it's going around the school. Do you need any more help?"

I was about to tell her that I didn't when Megan wandered in to see who the visitor was. She was about to speak but her face turned green again and fresh vomit sprayed out of her mouth, splattering her pajamas and the carpet at her feet before she rushed off to the bathroom.

I lowered my head once more, resigned to my fate, before looking at Maggie. "I don't suppose." I asked, "That you have any carpet cleaner? I used the last of mine about three vomits ago."

"Sure." She smiled, eyeing the stain that Megan had left. "I'll bring some right over."

By the time she returned I had things stable once again. The worst of the stain was removed, the two girls were in their beds with their third set of linen of the day, sleeping soundly, their faces feverish and moist. I took the opportunity to crack open a bottle of beer and sip it while watching the History Channel on television. I invited Maggie in and she demonstrated her carpet cleaner for me and then offered to sell me a year's supply of it from the distributor she was associated with. I told her that Carla handled all of those sorts of decisions and that she would have to talk to her about that. Unfair to Carla maybe, but then she didn't have to deal with the stomach flu and the broken dryer at the same time.

"Didn't you just love the way it cleaned the carpet though?" Maggie asked me. "Be sure to tell her how great of a job it does."

"I will." I promised absently, although I hadn't noticed any difference in cleaning ability from standard carpet cleaners. I waved to the couch. "Would you like to sit down?"

"Sure." She smiled, waddling over to the couch and planting herself there.

I offered her something to drink and, although I didn't have any caffeine-free diet cola on hand, she settled for some herbal tea that Carla kept around. I served her and that sat down in my chair across from her, sipping at my beer, which went down my throat like the finest wine.

"It's really strange." Maggie told me, eyeing my beer. "I haven't drank alcohol since I found The Lord, but since I've been pregnant, I've been craving the taste of it. The same thing happened with Joseph." She shrugged. "I guess God is testing me."

I nodded, though I figured it was probably just one of those bizarre cravings that pregnant women had. Carla used to crave honeydew melons and Cornish game hens when she was pregnant. She once ate three honeydews at a sitting and then threw it all up twenty minutes later. The alcohol thing interested me though.

"You used to drink?" I asked her.

She nodded. "Oh yes, back in high school and college, before I was saved, I used to drink some." Her eyes glazed a little with nostalgia. "I never really liked it that much, you understand, but I drank a little."

I could see in her eyes and hear in the tone of her voice that she was lying. I got the impression that she used to drink a lot and liked it immensely. I decided to pursue this line of questioning and see where it led. "Did you ever smoke pot?" I asked next.

"Oh no." She said, much too quickly. "I never touched THAT at all."

"What were you like?" I enquired. "Before you found The Lord?"

"I was a little bit of a wretch." She said, taking her words directly from 'Amazing Grace'. "I used to, you know, have a lot of boyfriends and such. I used to go to parties all of the time where everyone got drunk. But when I found the Lord, He showed me the errors of my ways."

So she used to have a good time, I figured, but now she was repressing it. It was a pity she was pregnant. Had she not been, I would have offered to roll a joint from the supply of greenbud I kept in the top shelf of the pantry and smoke it with her, just to test her resistance to temptation. Oh well, maybe some other time when she was not pregnant.

"You ever miss those days?" I asked her next.

"Never." She said, with conviction that was much too firm. "In the Lord I've found the strength to live a moral and decent life."

"I see." I said.

A minute later she was offering to make us a set of curtains for our dining room window. She could probably do it, she figured, for less than two hundred dollars. Again I belayed that decision to Carla, taking a perverse delight in doing so. I knew of course that Carla was perfectly capable of making new curtains with her own sewing machine for less than forty bucks worth of material.

She helped me throughout that miserable day, bringing my fresh, folded laundry to me and taking the wet loads back to her house. Together we finished all of the loads that had accumulated. In between loads she would sit and talk with me, drinking my wife's herbal tea (I was tempted to offer to sell her a supply of it for an inflated cost, but restrained myself) while I drank soda, water, or beer. She discussed frequently her favorite subject of conversation when talking to me, the personalities of the newscasters I dealt with at work. She particularly delighted in finding out that they were arrogant assholes, which most of them are. She tried to sell me things about ten times. She tried to invite me to bible studies or their church about twenty. But also, she seemed to be flirting with me in a friendly way, chatting in a way that she probably hadn't done since she'd found The Lord. I admired her looks and her body while we talked, entranced by her legs. They were really very pretty, shapely and well muscled, the edema of pregnancy only shaping them more alluringly. Pregnant women had always turned me on.

When it was time for her to go pick up Joseph from school and start making dinner for her family, she bade me farewell, reminding me to talk to Carla about the curtains and the carpet cleaner and all of the other things she tried to pawn off. I assured her I would. She then offered to help me with the laundry the next day if I required it. I gladly accepted for more than one reason.

Carla came home on schedule and helped me the rest of the night. She sympathized with me about having to put up, not only with stomach flu and a broken dryer, but Maggie as well. When we got the girls put down we shared a bottle of wine and then went to bed, stripping down and engaging in a typical session of marriage sex. As I thrust into my wife I found myself imagining that it was Maggie beneath me, her swollen stomach pressing into mine. I enjoyed the orgasm that this produced very much.

The good thing about the stomach flu is that it burns itself out very quickly. The girls stained one more set of bedding and two sets of pajamas but in the morning they were back to themselves, wolfing their breakfasts down and chattering happily to each other about how many times they'd puked the day before. I deemed them well enough to go to school and, once Carla left for work, drove them there and dropped them off. I ran into Maggie there as she dropped Joseph off.

"So they're better huh?" She asked, smiling.

"Much." I told her.

"Do you still need my help with laundry?"

"Please." I said. "It's not as much as yesterday but I still have quite a pile."

"What time should I come over?"

"Gimmee an hour to clean up and get the first load done. Sound good?"

"It's a date." She grinned, heading for her car, hands supporting her stomach.

She came over to pick up the first wet load precisely on time. She looked very pretty I noticed, dressed in a pair of loose-fitting bluejean overalls that bulged outward at the abdomen, and a white sweater. Her hair was pulled back in it's usual ponytail. I felt a strong tug of sexual attraction for her as I stood aside to allow her entry into my home.

She carried off my load of laundry and, although there was no reason for her to do so, she came back five minutes later to sit with me. I made her some tea as I emptied the dishwasher and then poured myself a cup of coffee and joined her in the living room. As we chatted she became slightly flirty again (in between trying to sell me things or save my soul that is) and I realized that she was starved for conversation. Bringing up the image of Jonathan in my mind, I didn't find this very surprising.

At one point I brought up her son. "So how is Joseph going to react to having a new baby in the house?" I asked her. "It'll be quite a change for him."

"Oh he's as excited as the Jonathan and I." She answered automatically. "He already loves the baby."

I nodded though I had my doubts. Joseph was a spoiled brat already and he'd had his parents to himself for seven years. I didn't think he was going to be too keen when he suddenly found his parent's attention taken almost completely by a squalling infant. I commented on how much time they'd chosen between their two children.

"We've wanted to have another one for a long time." She said. "I guess God finally decided to bless us again after all this time." She paused, and then said something completely out of character. "Or maybe Jonathan just finally picked the right time to get his dickens up."

While I translated the archaic statement in my mind I saw her blushing at what she'd said. She was talking about sex. Maggie! I certainly wasn't going to let this door shut once it had been opened.

"Really?" I said, raising my eyebrows. "Carla and I found that if we passed each other in the hall at the right time she was pregnant. I guess it just takes a little longer with some people. Did you have to do the temperature thing and ovulation prediction and all that?"

"No." She said. "We just let God's will take care of it." She soured. "Of course God could've put Jonathan in the mood a little more often and it might have saved a year or two."

Again she blushed, as if unable to believe that she'd said that.

"So Jonathan's not in the mood that often huh?"

Her face was now as red as a stop sign. "I really shouldn't be talking about it." She said. "It's not proper."