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My cell phone clutched in my hand, I looked unseeingly out the skylight, which was covered by the gray icy fingers of rain. I shivered as I spoke into the phone.

"I am flabbergasted," I said when I reached my friend's answering machine. "I just read my brother's story and it is better than the story I asked you to read . . . the one that took two years to write. He wrote it in an afternoon."

Gawd. This talent . . . this brother shook me to the core. I was the writer. I had experienced life. I had been a typesetter, a sailor, a technician, and a sales-clerk. All this life I had experienced so that I could write and feel the muse breathe down my neck, whisper in my ear. When I finally put pen to paper, I found that I must learn fiction. Fiction had a form. So I read the writing books. I could curse. "Nothing in fiction happens without a reason." But, life is not that way. Take this my brother, who is more talented than I.

I am not jealous. I am not jealous. If I say it like a mantra, maybe it won't be true? Am I jealous of this brother, this child of my heart?

This brother, just three days from his birth, had been thrust into my arms. Then, I had been a child of fourteen. My mother had had enough of his "neediness." He cried and cried and cried and cried when she held him, but he did not cry in my arms. I held him, rocked him, settled him, and loved him.

I read to him, before he had the structure of language imprinted on his brain, books like Les Miserables, The Counte of Monte Christo, The Hunchback of Notre Dam, and Jonathan Livingston Seagull. Yes, I am a voracious reader and I read them all to him.

I hushed him when his nerves, exacerbated by our parents' constant fighting, screamed to be released. In the soft night I rocked him to sleep. This baby, this child . . . now a man surpassed me, his surrogate mother.

Pride and envy brawled in my breast for dominance.

Pride surged because this brother, who I had hand-raised until three, had absorbed the craft of writing through me. I knew he had never studied the craft. My parents had made sure that he never went to school. They believed that a child would learn everything he or she needed to know through osmosis. And, maybe in my brother's case it was so.

Envy surged because he had, in one or two essays, captivated his freshman professor and internalized the fiction form. I had struggled for the last nine-months with my fiction. Many of the stories I had written were missing a component or two and sometimes did not make

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