Pushed away: Basil

It narrates the bad ending before anything has happened, reading small signals as the first evidence of the collapse it expects, and the forecasting works as insurance, since a disaster that has already been described cannot arrive as a shock. A family in which nothing anybody did ever improved anything supplied the underlying finding, and the finding has been generalised from that house to the structure of events in general. What it asks for is one prediction written down in advance and checked afterwards against what actually occurred.

I'll tell you how this ends, and I'm usually right, and I take no pleasure in it.

It echoes Woe in the old Russian poem, which attaches itself to a man and follows him wherever he goes, keeping closer the harder he runs and growing more familiar every year until he can no longer imagine travelling without it. The form implies a task: to notice how much of the company is being supplied by the traveller.