R - Raspberry #AtoZChallenge

My A to Z Challenge: Micro fiction, using 300 words or less, inspired by selected words along with a photo for inspiration. The words were chosen in reverse order from this lesson plan page.
(For example, for the letter A it was the 26th word on the list, for Z it was the 1st word on the list)

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I stared at the old photo of my younger sister, Samantha. I remembered the day I took it with my brand new, to me, Kodak Brownie. I asked Sam to pose for a photo and this is what she did. Being six years older and thus, I thought, wiser, I became mom and told her, "If you don't stop making faces, it's going to freeze like that." She stuck out her tongue again and proceeded to make a loud raspberry sound.

I set the photo aside and shuffled through the rest of the pictures chronicling my life. As I got older, the photos got fewer and fewer. Other interests came and went. College, marriage, divorce, re-marriage, children, another divorce. We lost touch for several years. She fell in with a rough crowd for a while, adverse to any personal advice.

She'd lived a hard life of her own choosing and ended up alienating family and friends. By the time she was thirty-five, she looked fifty-five. As my dad used to say, she looked like she'd been ridden hard and put up wet. I never understood the expression until I worked with our horses.

I flipped back to the first photo and looked at the back. I had written "Sister Samantha 1976". She had scrawled underneath, "My face isn't gonna freeze this way."

When water dropped onto the back of the picture, I realized I was crying. Crying for my sister Sam who had been found dead after a massive heart attack. Her facial features had been distorted from the pain she must have suffered before she succumbed. I was the one that ID'd her.

It was only now that I realized her facial contortions at the time of death meant it had frozen that way.