Writing Exercise

This excerpt is the result of my creative writing students asking me to participate in one of their workshopping exercises. There feels like there's a story and a strong character here, but I'm swamped with revising and editing my WIP right now. Because of that, it will just stay as an opening and a nebulous idea for now. I'm just curious if anyone else would be interested in seeing this developed at some point.

“Where were you last night?” Alice asked her fractured reflection. Just like every morning that had come before this, the ritual still provided no answer. Most people would have remembered the first morning they had faced a question like this with unshakable clarity, but its endless repetition had caused the memory to fade into a blur until she could no longer distinguish it from any other day. Maybe this was a good thing.

Despite the silence left by the lack of information, her shadow-ringed green eyes stood out against her pale and scarred complexion in a damning testimony to her nightly activities. She leaned into the cracked porcelain of the sink. Its edge dug into her left palm as she combed her black hair back from her forehead. Her fingers got stuck, tangled in its matted gunk. Whatever had happened last night, she would have another scar.

With a disgruntled expletive, she twisted the tap on and scraped the bloody muck off her fingers under the rush of water that stammered with a brown spurt. Glancing in the mirror again, she shut the water off and wiped her hands on her ragged BDU jacket. Behind her silhouette stretched a spartan room containing only a mattress in a corner and a three-legged table propped up on a stack of moldy phonebooks in place of its fourth leg. On the relatively clean table sat an old transistor radio and her Ruger P95.

“Well,” Alice addressed the gun, “looks like we survived one more night, baby.”