I think a little menace is fine to have in a story. For one thing, it's good for the circulation.

I’d like to go out in the front yard and shout something. “None of this is worth it!” That’s what I’d like people to hear.

He wondered if she wondered if he were watching her.

Nights without beginning that had no end. Talking about a past as if it'd really happened. Telling themselves that this time next year, this time next year, things were going to be different.

That morning she pours Teacher's over my belly and licks it off. That afternoon she tries to jump out the window.

It's possible, in a poem or short story, to write about commonplace things and objects using commonplace but precise language, and to endow those things—a chair, a window curtain, a fork, a stone, a woman's earring—with immense, even startling power.

Life and death matters, yes. And the question of how to behave in this world, how to go in the face of everything. Time is short and the water is rising.