Sunday Short: Yours & Mine by Rhiannon Hartley

Yours and Mine by Rhiannon Hartley is a short piece of memoir as opposed to a short piece of fiction, but it was so lovely I wanted to rec it anyway. Written for the sex issue of Stilts, a local, Brisbane journal, Yours and Mine covers relationships delicately and frankly, from pubescent boyfriends to falling in love with best friends. It's one of those horribly intimate pieces that resonates more than I generally care to admit, and that's really why it works.

I grew up as one of three sisters, sidelined to the subtleties of what I saw as another world. The older I got, the more private the idea of self seemed to become; the closeness I had once shared with my sisters was stretched and warped, and what I had once seen as a mutual experience suddenly seemed intensely personal, to be guarded at all costs. Coming of age for me was less about proving myself, and more about claiming myself.

 You can read Yours and Mine over at the Stilts website.